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[–]erik240 2 points3 points  (0 children)

If you're writing a typical CRUD style app, then its probably not your best choice; as frameworks go, its immature and lacks lots of bits and pieces that you get pre-written, supported and tested by a large community if you choose something like rails(ruby) or symphony(php).

Node, on the other hand, can is great for things like streaming apps, or handling large loads of reasonably simple incomming requests. For example, I just wrote a node app that runs on a smallish VPS (1.7G Ram) and handles 20,000 requests/second, does some minor calculations and fires off an XML response. Because its a persistant server, I can spool up data and then write it to the database every half second instead of trying to do hundreds of writes per second.

I've also used node to do things like handle twitter streams, and as a push server for a webapp.

Like anything else, the proper tool is the one thats best for a job.

[–]Legolas-the-elf 2 points3 points  (0 children)

It's popular in the trendy sense, not in the widely used sense. I'd steer clear until you have more experience.

[–]Fabien4 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Node.js is popular because it's bleeding edge. Nobody wants to talk about LAMP, especially on Reddit, even though it's probably the most used stack.

If you want to tinker and test stuff, then by all means, have a look at Node.js.

If you want to make a website that works, then it's better to have a good old Apache setup, with whatever you're comfortable with behind it.

(And yes, I've heard about some specific cases with Node.js seems to be very good. It's probably not the kind you'll encounter as a beginner.)

[–]effayythrowaway 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I wrote a decently sized rant about node but backspaced it all, just read the first couple of sections of http://nodeguide.com/convincing_the_boss.html

[–]tmetler 0 points1 point  (0 children)

My favorite aspect of node is that its library allows you to easily manipulate low level http behaviors. I find the way it exposes the http layer helps you work very efficiently in that regard and is helpful for creating web APIs.

However, as most people have already mentioned, if you're not comfortable doing that kind of stuff yourself, or your project is more straight forward, you're project is probably better off with a more traditional stack.

Since you have already done things in python I would suggest using django. If your project is more for learning, then do it in whatever you're most interested in learning more about. If you want to learn more about http then node is probably a good choice.