3 Interesting Reads on Node.js

Node.js had a busy week. Joyent relaunched its Node.js hosting service and O’Reilly Media posted a draft of Tom Hughes-Croucher’s Up and Running with Node.js book.

Node.js was also the star of a lengthy piece in the Register and pulled ahead of Clojure in Google Trends this week. To top it all off, Travis Glines gave us an idea of what building websites with it is really like.

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Node.js had a busy week. Joyent relaunched its Node.js hosting service and O’Reilly Media posted a draft of Tom Hughes-Croucher’s Up and Running with Node.js book.

Node.js was also the star of a lengthy piece in the Register and pulled ahead of Clojure in Google Trends this week. To top it all off, Travis Glines gave us an idea of what building websites with it is really like.

The Node Ahead: JavaScript Leaps from Browser Into Future

The Register’s lengthy profile of Node.js does a great job explaining what Node.js is and why it’s important. The paper interviewed Hughes-Croucher and Node.js creator Ryan Dahl, and covered some of the various ways the framework is being used in real settings. Hughes-Croucher makes the case that Node.js is the new PHP:

“For a while, I called it The New Rails,” says Tom Hughes-Croucher, the author of the upcoming O’Reilly tome Up and Running with Node.js (preview PDF) and the chief evangelist at cloud computing outfit Joyent, Node’s primary steward. “But then I realized it was getting more views on github than Rails. So now I call it The New PHP.”

What it’s like building a real website in Node.js

“It seems more and more so that people are interested in building their applications in node.js yet there are few reviews on what it’s actually like to work with the framework,” wrote Travis Glines as to why he decided to write a review of Node.js. Glines found that there was a steep learning curve, but he also found that the support was great and server stuff was easier to handle among other things.

Node.js Surpasses Clojure in Popularity

Arnor Heidar concluded his post about Node.js surpassing Clojure in terms of total search volume by writing “I don’t really want to turn this into a language flame war or give my theory of why one language is more popular than the other.” I have to say the same. I’m not sure how significant it is that Node.js has passed Clojure in particular, but the charts Heidar drudges up are a good demonstration of Node.js’s growing popularity.

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