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I do love when companies share this stuff. Thanks. > Rather than using PHP or Java (that was the requisite of the Forge platform), we have chosen a non-blockin
by meesterdude 12y ago
I do love when companies share this stuff. Thanks.
> Rather than using PHP or Java (that was the requisite of the Forge platform), we have chosen a non-blocking framework, NodeJS with the Express framework . This allows us to serve more simultaneous requests, increasing the performance of the application.
I don't doubt this is true, but its worth noting you can get good performance out of a "blocking" framework too. Node.js does better than others in some situations, but in this its not a snowflake, and is in some regards worse.
But I will criticize priorities: I think this is too much fad, not enough practical. the experience is notably worse than the old site, and it seems like they just threw buzzwords at their problems instead of really crafting a solid solution.
I think where they're coming from, maybe this makes sense - they needed to overshoot from their previous platform. But I think they'll find it problematic in the long run and change some of their approaches and release a new site, and that will be a good platform and serve their needs for a good while.
- blowski 12y agoI agree that it sounds very faddish, but that might be the whole point of the blog post - attracting talented developers. Manchester has an up and coming startup scene, which presumably the BBC is competing with in the hiring pool, and brandishing their hipster credentials may be one way of doing that.
- mercurial 12y agoI must confess I'm quite surprised that they would get more performance out of NodeJS than with a decent Java framework. Java has its problems, but it's usually fast.
- hokay 12y agoThey do mention prototyping with Scala and Clojure. I also doubt NodeJS beat the JVM out and out in performance. Maybe they went with Node because it is easier to hire web developers that know javascript than it is to hire web developers with knowledge of the JVM
- mercurial 12y agoJava developers are not exactly a scarce commodity.
- Bahamut 12y agoWhen you rewrite sites, that is often what happens. It will almost always be buggy at first, then it stabilizes as those bugs are fixed.