Deciding Why To Use Node JS

Why Use Node JS

Throughout the past few years, node.js has caught alot of people’s attention, including myself. So, I hope to explain in my own words, when and how I would use node.js. This is written from the perspective of a web developer who dominantly hand codes PHP, mySQL, HTML and CSS programmer. 

After Googling many different queries about node.js, you often find nothing about node.js vs html. Since basic Bootstrap websites will be more efficient than using a server side language, this can be chalked up as old school technology still being the most effective, especially with caching. So, for a small website with under 8 pages and hardly any future changes, HTML would be unbeatable, at least until someone tells me convincingly different.

With all that said, I spent the better part of a week setting up node applications…including Ghost. After the usual ‘things not going real smoothly’,  I did end up getting everything to work out on an Ubuntu 14 installation and learned the basic ins and outs of the setups; including startup scripts with Linux.

About The Present

When I look at these three links from w3techs.com, it shows how WordPress is still dominating market share and PHP is over 81% of the server side market share. Javascript shows only 0.2% market share and Node.js shows 0.1%.

http://w3techs.com/technologies/overview/content_management/all
http://w3techs.com/technologies/overview/programming_language/all
http://w3techs.com/technologies/details/ws-nodejs/all/all

Back to WordPress. The reason I use the WordPress example is to show that it is increasing in usage and market share. The link http://w3techs.com/technologies/details/cm-wordpress/all/all shows this.

What I am trying to get at here is that from a web developer’s perspective, there are so many WordPress and PHP sites that taking over these works or rehosting them is likely going to happen in the form of their current technology, or from using httrack to convert them to plain, old HTML. Making a makeover to Node will take more time and unlikely be appealing, especially cost-wise to a client.

So, from a typical web developer’s point of view, turning your back on popularity is not an option. On top of that, the race for better hardware is always on the up and up. So, although technology can make leaner, faster code, hardware can do the same.

And, for new websites, lean coding, strong caching(like Smarty Caching with PHP) and Varnish, and the realism that most clients are only capable of so much local traffic, I would likely not go to node.js. No only would the site take longer to build, but, the pros do not outweigh the cons.

Now, where I could use Node would be with the Ghost blogging platform because it is easy to setup, clone, and use. Also, it runs very fast and has decent documentation and templates.

When I Would Use Node JS

To put it bluntly, I would only use node.js to develop a web application that would need the ability to be very fast and handle very many users, or, with the Ghost blogging platform or newer complete applications that have a proven track record.

Typically, a custom node.js application would be a web developer’s dream application that had this potential to grow and prosper. However, realistically, this excludes almost any building of a typical small business website, or web application that would unlikely handle enough users to overload the hosting environment.

As far as custom coding goes, it would take some transition since it reminds me of a new experience with Smarty templating, using a PHP Framework, or trying to customize Joomla for the first time. Since node.js has synchronous and asynchronous ways of doing things, it is best to test and try rather than write code that will cause issues down the road.

August 1, 2015 by kent