What You Need To Node

by Brad Seraphin

Are you an executive for a company on the brink of making a major decision about the future of your tech stack, but you know nothing about programming and you’re in way over your head? Or, maybe you searched “Node” because you overheard your developers mention the term, and you want to understand the basics…

Node is a technology that was created to make app development easier and faster through improving the performance of the browser centric programming language Javascript by creating a server side environment for using Javascript without a browser.

Some people love it. Some people hate it. Some people are still on the fence.

Central to the debate is Node’s use of the same language, Javascript, on the browser side and on the server. In solving development issues commonly encountered when integrating front-end and back-end programming languages, Node allows developers to prototype apps faster and easier.

However, these prototype apps can quickly become a rats nest of programming language when new features are added or changes to the app are required. Front-end developers with little experience writing server side code increase the risk of this issue.

For those tech companies willing to join the growing Node community, Node provides lean solutions to numerous app development problems. A growing Node community becomes increasingly attractive to large enterprises seeking to avoid writing custom code, instead using Node’s existing libraries of proven concepts that can be customized to their needs.

While composability of code might be a recently trending concept in the Javascript community, Node implements lessons learned from many older programming languages and styles. Consider the following progression: Google’s V8 foreshadowed Javascript being used as a full fledged programming language. Node showed that it could be used in a practical way, and has helped expose some of the shortcomings of Javascript’s original specifications. The Node community has shown that Node has a place in being a valuable tool in the web app development arsenal.

No major systems language has emerged in over a decade, but over that time the computing landscape has changed tremendously. What V8 started, and what Ryan Dahl, and other developers working at Joyent created in Node, has led to the development of new languages like GO, tagged as an open source programming language that makes it easy to build simple, reliable, and efficient software.

Can Node be an elegant solution for developers with experience and talent?

There is no correct answer to the debate. The correct answer is that you need to pick the right tool for the job. Competent Node programmers will understand the advantages and disadvantages, and consider speed and scalability requirements. Unfortunately, incompetent programmers won’t. If the only tool you have for the job is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

Advice for business people without engineering backgrounds that are concerned over their company’s use of Node: Stay out of it. Just make sure you have talented engineers working for you, or at least make sure the one at the very top is very good.