Hello! If you know me or if you have read my blog you know I like C#, a lot. However …
I cannot help to notice that C# has its shortcomings especially when it comes around web, webservices and usually it’s not particularly easy to do simple stuff and sometimes comes with a lot of code, code which you don’t really need. I have been experimenting with node.js in the past couple of weeks and I could already see some strengths which blow C# out of the water. I’ll go through some of those strengths, my experience with the language and maybe I’ll even start some tutorials on it as javascript has become my second favorite language of development. You may want to read this paragraph again, hah.
Things I really like about node.js:
- great package manager(npm). Specify your dependencies in a json file(package.json) and run npm install and all your dependencies are there. That easy!
- very fast. To understand this: I have this little thing in C# and while I use multiple threads in took more than 5 minutes to complete. Did the same thing in node.js and it was completed in less than one minute. What?!?! Development time was considerably shorter and I could even argue that number of lines of code was considerably shorter even though node.js is much newer to me compared to C#.
- inherently asynchronous but single threaded. Goodbye thread synchronization issues but be careful to heavy cpu work as it can render your application unresponsive
- it has some sort of LINQ called ArrowFunctions. We all love lambdas!
- lightweight libraries for frontend, backend and everything else
- very very very easy to use with json data format.
- sure it’s cross-platform
- very easy to build APIs
For development I used Webstorm because it gives the feeling of an IDE with debugging, watcher and everything nice. But feel free any text editor with some javascript plugin. You can get Webstorm for free if you are doing open source projects or use it for education purposes.
As a conclusion I’d say that the most impressive thing about node.js is the simplicity with which you can build stuff, not to mention speed. I am sure there are shortcomings to this technology as well but I am yet to discover.
See you soon on get started with node.js.
npm start
