No, it's not all hype. I've used Node to write a server for ticket scanners at a festival and enjoyed working with it. It performed well and was stable. I'm just sceptical about someone who wants to throw away a codebase for something that, whether deserved or not, is generating a lot of buzz at the moment.

Though re Python I would say mixing Django with Twisted is a fairly blatant error. There are libraries built on Twisted to serve web-pages, and if you're doing event-driven programming you should really be using them.

________________________________________
From: Code for Libraries [[log in to unmask]] on behalf of Ed Summers [[log in to unmask]]
Sent: 09 May 2012 09:24
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [CODE4LIB] Anyone using node.js?

On Wed, May 9, 2012 at 3:47 AM, Berry, Rob <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> You almost certainly should not rewrite an entire codebase from scratch unless there's an extremely good reason to do so. JoelOnSoftware did a good piece on it - http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html.
>
> Why has your project manager decided Node.js is the way to go instead of something like Python or Perl? Just because it's a shiny new technology? Python's got Twisted and Perl has POE if you want to do asynchronous programming. They also both have a very large number of excellent quality libraries to do innumerable other things.

I totally agree, it's all about the right tool for the job.

Just to clarify, NodeJS is quite a bit different than Twisted and POE
because the entire language and its supporting libraries are written
for event driven programming from the bottom up. When using Twisted
and POE you may end up needing existing libraries that are
synchronous, so the wins aren't as great, and things can
get...complicated. For a pretty even handed description of this check
out Paul Querna's blog post about why Rackspace decided to switch from
Twisted to NodeJS for their cloud monitoring dashboard applications
[1].

I am not saying Perl and Python are not good tools (they are) just
that the benefits of using NodeJS are not all hype.

//Ed

[1] http://journal.paul.querna.org/articles/2011/12/18/the-switch-python-to-node-js/