7 ms·

Why Node is becoming the go-to technology in Enterprise

32 points by unheaped 13y ago

jf22 13y ago
If I was the CTO of Walmart I'd fire somebody for doing a deployment on Black Friday. Even if I was 99% certain everything would go fine that's just too much of a risk to take. Unless some kind of show stopping issue was happening I'd wait until after cyber monday or plan the release way before hand.
- sehr 13y ago
  Where did you get the idea they deployed for the first time on Black Friday? They had it out and ready well before then.
  - AjithAntony 13y ago
    The quoted tweet "... we decided middle of black friday is perfect time for a release"
  - kiernan 13y ago
    Where did you get the idea it was the first time? Their point is it's a pretty risky day for any deployment.
jmspring 13y ago
The article lost me at quotes like this one (both for content and persons position when talking enterprise) -- “Why go to Facebook and do PHP when you can go to PayPal and do Node.js” - Bill Scott – Dir UX PayPal
- fennecfoxen 13y ago
  Clearly you haven't suffered the misfortune of having to program in PHP recently. Alternatively, you may have Stockholm syndrome. (I mean, Node's okay, not my favorite, but PHP is still as much "training wheels without the bike" as it ever was.)
  - drakaal 13y ago
    Hip Hop, and "PHP" don't really share that much. Wordpress templating is what a lot of people think PHP is like. Zend Framework too. But saying PHP and Hip Hop are the same is kind of like saying Shakespeare and Flavor Flav both speak English. Sure they both do a lot of Rhyming, but you'd have a hard time getting the two to understand one another. (I don't like PHP particularly, but calling what FB does "php" is inaccurate)
    - elbear 13y ago
      My understanding is that developers write PHP. To what interpreter that code is passed is another matter.
      - drakaal 13y ago
        Your understanding is limited. PHP has the ability to be written "inline" basically all of PHP acts like a templating engine. That's not how FB makes its developers write. That's a big difference. Also HipHop supports a subset of PHP's functions, which actually causes you to write better code because you can't lean on things like "eval" and dynamic defines. This makes your code better. There is a lot of "this kind of stuff" that makes PHP very different from HipHop.
        elbear 13y ago
        Whether they write PHP mixed with HTML is another thing. The point is that they write PHP and not some other language, which is what I was saying. HipHop has near full support for PHP 5.4, including the "create_function" and "eval" functions.[1] Yes, PHP and HipHop are different, because one is a language and the other is a virtual machine. [1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HipHop_for_PHP http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HipHop_for_PHP
  - arbuge 13y ago
    Misfortune because you have to code in PHP? Seems like a bit of an exaggeration to me...
- ams6110 13y ago
  My thought at that was "great, in 12-18 months PayPal will have a bunch of devs saying "why stay here and do Node.js when I can go to company Foo and do <current trendy language du-jour>."
drakaal 13y ago
Ok, so let's start with. No. For a number of reasons. "Web Scale deployments" like Linked-in and Pay-Pal aren't actually what most people call Enterprise. The line blurs a bit, but because they are Massive Scale Single Task solutions they aren't what the industry defines as enterprise. Second. Node is use primarily in two places, Private Cloud. (like pay pal and linked in) where you want to run on hardware as a commodity, but don't want the overhead of a true VPS, instead you run in an "Engine" which is hardware independent. That's great if you are Huge. But it makes less sense in traditional enterprise... Which is why we come to number 3.... Third. Node isn't secure enough for Enterprise. Enterprise runs on well tested, secure, solutions, with strong support, because... You can't get hacked, you can't deal with your developer quitting, and you can't deal with the solution is no longer supported. This piece is marketing hype, not "white paper fact" or even "Case study support" Yes I expect lots of downvotes, happens every time I say something bad about node. But the truth of it is that Node is for Hackers, not for production. It is tech born from a poorly conceived language, running in an engine that was designed for clients not servers, and unless you have a team of security guys, and a strong proxy, and a bunch of other things, it is not "production safe".
- briantakita 13y ago
  Node is "production safe". The many deployments and success stories override your fud. It's time for you to move on and bash a newer, emerging, "unproven" technology. In the mean time, have fun with cobol, cause that's the only "proven" technology out there :-,
  - drakaal 13y ago
    Number of deployments doesn't equate to secure, or Windows 95 would have been considered Secure in 1996. (It's in good shape these days) Most companies get Node to be "secure" by putting a Proxy in front of it. Doing a lot of packet inspection, and limiting interactions with the server to validated requests. If you set something like this up you can make anything secure. But most people can't do this, they don't know how. Most enterprise don't do this because setting up packet inspection for validation requires a lot of planning, and so unless you are massive scale it isn't worth, so this remains in the realm of things only banks and financial institutions do.
buckbova 13y ago
>We're dedicated to Node.js nearForm was founded in 2011 by Richard Rodger and Cian Ó Maidín with the vision to help Node.js to become a mainstream technology. http://www.nearform.com/about-us http://www.nearform.com/about-us Explains the article. And founding a company to promote a development stack? I don't get it.
jarjoura 13y ago
If all you're building is a service proxy to a database, node will get you very far really fast. Its thin layer will allow you write a clean REST api that consumers can reliably call. Javascript does not scale well though when a project grows to hundreds of thousands of lines of code, but that shouldn't stop you from investigating TypeScript, Dart, or even Coffeescript.
- lowboy 13y ago
  I am a proponent (and user) of CoffeeScript, but it won't help you very much with maintainable architecture. It's mostly just syntactic sugar over normal JavaScript.
  - lightblade 13y ago
    I work on a large web application that sits currently at 50k lines of CoffeeScript and spans 10+ feature branches at all time. No, it does not scale. Especially true when the project also spans that many branches. Everyone merging up and down the branches. You get to have backend people merging frontend codes without much problem because it's all dynamic. Then you found out it was a bad merge in production because CoffeeScript doesn't care. The fact that CoffeeScript makes braces optional causes a lot of problem because when it fails, it fails silently. Bad merge happens, but you'll want it to fail loudly when it does happens. Out of Dart, TypeScript and CoffeeScript, I recommend TypeScript for large scale projects. Dart is good if you have a lot of man power to build in house components, but it has a very closed ecosystem that does not play well with other JavaScript libraries.
    - dragonwriter 13y ago
      > Dart is good if you have a lot of man power to build in house components, but it has a very closed ecosystem that does not play well with other JavaScript libraries. You mean "JavaScript libraries", not "other JavaScript libraries". Dart is a language one of whose implementations is a compiler-to-JS, but it most assuredly is not, and does not pretend to be, a JavaScript library.
    - 13y ago
briantakita 13y ago
Node.js, with browserify, is great for client side development. That alone makes it a good fit for any web programming shop.
bowlofpetunias 13y ago
Selling Node.js like snake oil with hollow marketing BS is seriously going to backfire very, very soon. I have no strong feelings about Node either way, but people who value Node should downvote stuff like this into oblivion. I've seen more substance in copy for a Herbalife ad.
programminggeek 13y ago
If Node is taking over the enterprise, we are going to have a lot of broken Enterprise apps that are wildly unmaintainable in a few short years.
- jfoutz 13y ago
  Yeah. That'll be very different from, say, Thursday.
- briantakita 13y ago
  Because good programmers get turned into bad programmers by node.js. And bad programmers get turned into good programmers with the mainstream technology X.
  - thirsteh 13y ago
    Call me when the average node.js programmer picks up Haskell. We'll be better off in nearly every conceivable way.
jmspring 13y ago
Honest question - this is like the 4th NodeJS related article to make it to the first page in the last couple of days after a period of quiet. Is there something in the Node ecosystem prompting this?
carsongross 13y ago
Thank goodness! I never thought I'd live to see it, but, finally, after all these years... A silver bullet has been found, gentlemen!
philosophus 13y ago
"becoming the go-to technology in Enterprise[y]" Hmm, I work for a company that processes insurance claims. That's enterprisey, right? Let me tell you you'll get a blank/'are you crazy' type stare if you suggest node.js here (rightly or wrongly). We use programs written in COBOL running on AS/400. That's insurance/banking enterprise software. The very thought of running some trendy hipster WWW-popup-box-turned-server-side "programming language" like JavaScript for anything -- anything at all -- is likely to be met with disgust. Like I said, this might not actually be the right attitude to take, but rest assured the "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" attitude still prevails in the truly enterprisey enterprise.

32 points by unheaped 13y ago

jf22 13y ago

If I was the CTO of Walmart I'd fire somebody for doing a deployment on Black Friday. Even if I was 99% certain everything would go fine that's just too much of a risk to take. Unless some kind of show stopping issue was happening I'd wait until after cyber monday or plan the release way before hand.

sehr 13y ago
Where did you get the idea they deployed for the first time on Black Friday? They had it out and ready well before then.
- AjithAntony 13y ago
  The quoted tweet "... we decided middle of black friday is perfect time for a release"
- kiernan 13y ago
  Where did you get the idea it was the first time? Their point is it's a pretty risky day for any deployment.

jmspring 13y ago

The article lost me at quotes like this one (both for content and persons position when talking enterprise) -- “Why go to Facebook and do PHP when you can go to PayPal and do Node.js” - Bill Scott – Dir UX PayPal

fennecfoxen 13y ago
Clearly you haven't suffered the misfortune of having to program in PHP recently. Alternatively, you may have Stockholm syndrome. (I mean, Node's okay, not my favorite, but PHP is still as much "training wheels without the bike" as it ever was.)
- drakaal 13y ago
  Hip Hop, and "PHP" don't really share that much. Wordpress templating is what a lot of people think PHP is like. Zend Framework too. But saying PHP and Hip Hop are the same is kind of like saying Shakespeare and Flavor Flav both speak English. Sure they both do a lot of Rhyming, but you'd have a hard time getting the two to understand one another. (I don't like PHP particularly, but calling what FB does "php" is inaccurate)
  - elbear 13y ago
    My understanding is that developers write PHP. To what interpreter that code is passed is another matter.
    - drakaal 13y ago
      Your understanding is limited. PHP has the ability to be written "inline" basically all of PHP acts like a templating engine. That's not how FB makes its developers write. That's a big difference. Also HipHop supports a subset of PHP's functions, which actually causes you to write better code because you can't lean on things like "eval" and dynamic defines. This makes your code better. There is a lot of "this kind of stuff" that makes PHP very different from HipHop.
      - elbear 13y ago
        Whether they write PHP mixed with HTML is another thing. The point is that they write PHP and not some other language, which is what I was saying. HipHop has near full support for PHP 5.4, including the "create_function" and "eval" functions.[1] Yes, PHP and HipHop are different, because one is a language and the other is a virtual machine. [1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HipHop_for_PHP http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HipHop_for_PHP
- arbuge 13y ago
  Misfortune because you have to code in PHP? Seems like a bit of an exaggeration to me...
ams6110 13y ago
My thought at that was "great, in 12-18 months PayPal will have a bunch of devs saying "why stay here and do Node.js when I can go to company Foo and do <current trendy language du-jour>."

drakaal 13y ago

Ok, so let's start with. No. For a number of reasons. "Web Scale deployments" like Linked-in and Pay-Pal aren't actually what most people call Enterprise. The line blurs a bit, but because they are Massive Scale Single Task solutions they aren't what the industry defines as enterprise. Second. Node is use primarily in two places, Private Cloud. (like pay pal and linked in) where you want to run on hardware as a commodity, but don't want the overhead of a true VPS, instead you run in an "Engine" which is hardware independent. That's great if you are Huge. But it makes less sense in traditional enterprise... Which is why we come to number 3.... Third. Node isn't secure enough for Enterprise. Enterprise runs on well tested, secure, solutions, with strong support, because... You can't get hacked, you can't deal with your developer quitting, and you can't deal with the solution is no longer supported. This piece is marketing hype, not "white paper fact" or even "Case study support" Yes I expect lots of downvotes, happens every time I say something bad about node. But the truth of it is that Node is for Hackers, not for production. It is tech born from a poorly conceived language, running in an engine that was designed for clients not servers, and unless you have a team of security guys, and a strong proxy, and a bunch of other things, it is not "production safe".

briantakita 13y ago
Node is "production safe". The many deployments and success stories override your fud. It's time for you to move on and bash a newer, emerging, "unproven" technology. In the mean time, have fun with cobol, cause that's the only "proven" technology out there :-,
- drakaal 13y ago
  Number of deployments doesn't equate to secure, or Windows 95 would have been considered Secure in 1996. (It's in good shape these days) Most companies get Node to be "secure" by putting a Proxy in front of it. Doing a lot of packet inspection, and limiting interactions with the server to validated requests. If you set something like this up you can make anything secure. But most people can't do this, they don't know how. Most enterprise don't do this because setting up packet inspection for validation requires a lot of planning, and so unless you are massive scale it isn't worth, so this remains in the realm of things only banks and financial institutions do.

buckbova 13y ago

>We're dedicated to Node.js nearForm was founded in 2011 by Richard Rodger and Cian Ó Maidín with the vision to help Node.js to become a mainstream technology. http://www.nearform.com/about-us http://www.nearform.com/about-us Explains the article. And founding a company to promote a development stack? I don't get it.

jarjoura 13y ago

If all you're building is a service proxy to a database, node will get you very far really fast. Its thin layer will allow you write a clean REST api that consumers can reliably call. Javascript does not scale well though when a project grows to hundreds of thousands of lines of code, but that shouldn't stop you from investigating TypeScript, Dart, or even Coffeescript.

lowboy 13y ago
I am a proponent (and user) of CoffeeScript, but it won't help you very much with maintainable architecture. It's mostly just syntactic sugar over normal JavaScript.
- lightblade 13y ago
  I work on a large web application that sits currently at 50k lines of CoffeeScript and spans 10+ feature branches at all time. No, it does not scale. Especially true when the project also spans that many branches. Everyone merging up and down the branches. You get to have backend people merging frontend codes without much problem because it's all dynamic. Then you found out it was a bad merge in production because CoffeeScript doesn't care. The fact that CoffeeScript makes braces optional causes a lot of problem because when it fails, it fails silently. Bad merge happens, but you'll want it to fail loudly when it does happens. Out of Dart, TypeScript and CoffeeScript, I recommend TypeScript for large scale projects. Dart is good if you have a lot of man power to build in house components, but it has a very closed ecosystem that does not play well with other JavaScript libraries.
  - dragonwriter 13y ago
    > Dart is good if you have a lot of man power to build in house components, but it has a very closed ecosystem that does not play well with other JavaScript libraries. You mean "JavaScript libraries", not "other JavaScript libraries". Dart is a language one of whose implementations is a compiler-to-JS, but it most assuredly is not, and does not pretend to be, a JavaScript library.
  - 13y ago

briantakita 13y ago

Node.js, with browserify, is great for client side development. That alone makes it a good fit for any web programming shop.

bowlofpetunias 13y ago

Selling Node.js like snake oil with hollow marketing BS is seriously going to backfire very, very soon. I have no strong feelings about Node either way, but people who value Node should downvote stuff like this into oblivion. I've seen more substance in copy for a Herbalife ad.

programminggeek 13y ago

If Node is taking over the enterprise, we are going to have a lot of broken Enterprise apps that are wildly unmaintainable in a few short years.

jfoutz 13y ago
Yeah. That'll be very different from, say, Thursday.
briantakita 13y ago
Because good programmers get turned into bad programmers by node.js. And bad programmers get turned into good programmers with the mainstream technology X.
- thirsteh 13y ago
  Call me when the average node.js programmer picks up Haskell. We'll be better off in nearly every conceivable way.

jmspring 13y ago

Honest question - this is like the 4th NodeJS related article to make it to the first page in the last couple of days after a period of quiet. Is there something in the Node ecosystem prompting this?

carsongross 13y ago

Thank goodness! I never thought I'd live to see it, but, finally, after all these years... A silver bullet has been found, gentlemen!

philosophus 13y ago

"becoming the go-to technology in Enterprise[y]" Hmm, I work for a company that processes insurance claims. That's enterprisey, right? Let me tell you you'll get a blank/'are you crazy' type stare if you suggest node.js here (rightly or wrongly). We use programs written in COBOL running on AS/400. That's insurance/banking enterprise software. The very thought of running some trendy hipster WWW-popup-box-turned-server-side "programming language" like JavaScript for anything -- anything at all -- is likely to be met with disgust. Like I said, this might not actually be the right attitude to take, but rest assured the "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" attitude still prevails in the truly enterprisey enterprise.