Node.js in the real world: step out of the buzzword cloud and get things done!

See what I did with that title ?

Node.js has been the subject of much talk and discussion in the past couple of years. People keep talking about it's amazing capabilities for the real time web and the fact that it allows you to do JavaScript Everywhere (TM). And everyone loves to show their toy apps which they've built in 5 minutes with a few lines of JavaScript.

But what about things being built in the real world with Node.js ? And what's the real advantage of having JavaScript on the server side ?

This talk will go through real world usage examples, tools, components (how they help you and what they can do for you), tips on how to manage projects and code and all the other things that you need to think about when you set out to do real work.

Transcript

1. Node.js in the real world 1 Thursday, November 10, 11
2. Tiago Rodrigues @trodrigues (twitter, github, etc) 2 Thursday, November 10, 11
3. 3 Thursday, November 10, 11 social games developer in london
4. 4 Thursday, November 10, 11 JS dev for 3 years writing JS for longer than that love for the language strenghts (and also knowledge of weaknesses)
5. 5 Thursday, November 10, 11 naturally attracted to node.js however, many things taken from granted not there when i started looking at it
6. “OMG! look at the amazing chat app I wrote in 5 lines of code!” 6 Thursday, November 10, 11
7. But things changed... 7 Thursday, November 10, 11 lot more libraries these days
8. Community to the rescue! 8 Thursday, November 10, 11 thanks to the amazing community
9. 9 Thursday, November 10, 11 taking huge advantage of github and opensource models
10. Real world usage means useful modules and libraries 10 Thursday, November 10, 11 people are developing real products with node and creating the modules and libraries needed
11. And lots of new (old) problems to solve... 11 Thursday, November 10, 11 some of the problems are general and seen in another languages and frameworks
12. 12 Thursday, November 10, 11 fooled you. not really making node.js apps in the real world (yet) always taken an interest on how node can have real world usage
13. A lot of this is not new 13 Thursday, November 10, 11 Been aggregating others experiences over time
14. But before that... 14 Thursday, November 10, 11 why node.js is important (not getting deep into this) benefits are also very relative
15. 15 Thursday, November 10, 11 remember this? most of it still stands!
16. JS Everywhere! 16 Thursday, November 10, 11 code reuse benefits not always present less of a mind shift in small companies
17. You probably already know JS... 17 Thursday, November 10, 11
18. But you should learn it properly 18 Thursday, November 10, 11
19. 19 Thursday, November 10, 11 use jshint FFS!
20. Event based goodness 20 Thursday, November 10, 11 Everything is asynchronous, many libs developed from scratch for node the language is (somehow) ready for it
21. Performance? 21 Thursday, November 10, 11
22. 22 Thursday, November 10, 11 Some say...it’s faster than Java/Python/Ruby/whatever... Depends a lot on your use case (and if you did things right)
23. Good at fulfilling lots of small requests 23 Thursday, November 10, 11 better for responding to lots of small requests some reports of bad performance: low throughput reports...
24. V8 is crazy fast 24 Thursday, November 10, 11
25. But... 25 Thursday, November 10, 11 one thing you need to understand
26. Node.js is not the new X 26 Thursday, November 10, 11 not A web framework intended to write network programs (webservers mostly)
27. Make sure it makes sense for you http://nodeguide.com/convincing_the_boss.html 27 Thursday, November 10, 11 you might not need it. don’t throw away your django apps yet
28. Or find an appropriate use case 28 Thursday, November 10, 11
29. Ok, I want to use node 29 Thursday, November 10, 11 Some things you need to know (not getting deep into this)
30. Tutorials? How to Node, Node Tuts... 30 Thursday, November 10, 11 pgte in the house?
31. The building blocks 31 Thursday, November 10, 11
32. Socket.io, connect, express, vows... 32 Thursday, November 10, 11 lots of templating and database connectors
33. If it exists, it’s on npm 33 Thursday, November 10, 11
34. Or node-toolbox http://toolbox.no.de/ 34 Thursday, November 10, 11
35. 35 Thursday, November 10, 11 or build it yourself...
36. 36 Thursday, November 10, 11 Or contribute to the community
37. 37 Thursday, November 10, 11 framework initiative: lots of components together to form a network
38. The problems 38 Thursday, November 10, 11
39. It doesn’t really scale magically 39 Thursday, November 10, 11
40. 40 Thursday, November 10, 11 lots of solutions, cluster the most common now part of node
41. What about IPC? 41 Thursday, November 10, 11
42. Shared file descriptors via Unix sockets http://bit.ly/lUyx5n 42 Thursday, November 10, 11 unix sockets on the same machine, faster than network (duh) cluster helps
43. hook.io 43 Thursday, November 10, 11 hook.io across machines
44. Message queues, redis, memcache... 44 Thursday, November 10, 11
45. What about heavy processes? 45 Thursday, November 10, 11
46. Separate them out of your main event loop http://1.jn.5d.sl.pt 46 Thursday, November 10, 11 Or even write them natively if you need to
47. Separate stuff that doesn’t need to be done in real time 47 Thursday, November 10, 11 and shown back to the user
48. haibu 48 Thursday, November 10, 11 load balancer, cluster manager, get more info on this
49. How bout that pesky 1gb heap limit? 49 Thursday, November 10, 11 It’s gone now. Not sure if on node yet
50. But I don’t like callbacks! 50 Thursday, November 10, 11 suffering from callbackitis?
51. 51 Thursday, November 10, 11 bad example. it can be a nightmare
52. Flow control libraries? streamline, tame, promise, async, futures, step... 52 Thursday, November 10, 11 should i use them?
53. All of them suck. 53 Thursday, November 10, 11 Code compilation, writing code in weird ways
54. My take? 54 Thursday, November 10, 11
55. 55 Thursday, November 10, 11 learn how to deal with it
56. Stop using nested anonymous functions! 56 Thursday, November 10, 11 separate named functions
57. Use bind to pass inner variables around underscore.js is your friend and JS will have it by default 57 Thursday, November 10, 11 good old bind from prototype.js this is not jquery bind
58. If you really need flow control, read this: http://howto.no.de/flow-control-in-npm https://github.com/isaacs/slide-flow-control 58 Thursday, November 10, 11
59. Named functions also help with debugging 59 Thursday, November 10, 11
60. 60 Thursday, November 10, 11 so you can avoid stuff like this
61. Name everything! 61 Thursday, November 10, 11
62. Even if you’re doing client side JS 62 Thursday, November 10, 11
63. Log everything http://bit.ly/lUyx5n 63 Thursday, November 10, 11 everytime you have problems and aggregate it in redis or something
64. If it dies and you don’t know why you’re in a world of pain 64 Thursday, November 10, 11 yes, this is a problem with node you might be leaving stuff hanging and cause memory leaks
65. If you don’t know why it fails, kill it 65 Thursday, November 10, 11 restart the process on uncaught exceptions or node gets wonky and you don’t really know why it fails
66. But kill it nicely! http://1.jx.y4.sl.pt 66 Thursday, November 10, 11 Don’t just kill existing connections. Cleanup and kill it as gracefully as you can. process monitors are your friends
67. You should be treating your errors early anyway 67 Thursday, November 10, 11 if you know what problems can arise, treat them remember, log everything
68. Measure stuff https://github.com/mikejihbe/metrics 68 Thursday, November 10, 11
69. 69 Thursday, November 10, 11 and test your code ffs
70. So what are people doing with node? 70 Thursday, November 10, 11
71. JSDOM 71 Thursday, November 10, 11 standalone DOM implementation
72. Run client tests on the server 72 Thursday, November 10, 11 zombie.js
73. Pre-render DOM nodes http://www.yuiblog.com/blog/2010/09/29/video-glass-node/ 73 Thursday, November 10, 11 render on the server as a fallback or for mobile
74. node-canvas 74 Thursday, November 10, 11 standalone canvas implementation
75. Render on the server for unsupported browsers 75 Thursday, November 10, 11
76. http:// 76 Thursday, November 10, 11 no idea what they’re doing with node been doing async in c++ for a while
77. 77 Thursday, November 10, 11 many contributions to node core and other modules using node since the early days
78. jsconf wifi https://github.com/mabels/Sashimi 78 Thursday, November 10, 11 connection load balancing based on whatever types of connections are available wifi at jsconf.us: fucking awesome!
79. 79 Thursday, November 10, 11 realtime classroom management app
80. socket.io, express, node- canvas, mongoose... 80 Thursday, November 10, 11 Huge node contributors: Guillermo Rauch, TJ Holowaychuk
81. 81 Thursday, November 10, 11 node as a backend, huge contributors amazing IDE these days
82. 82 Thursday, November 10, 11 huge huge contributors node.js app hosting
83. 83 Thursday, November 10, 11 realtime private car location service node always gets locations of drivers
84. 84 Thursday, November 10, 11 node.js daemon for stats collection via udp aggregates and sends data to graphite
85. 85 Thursday, November 10, 11 wireframing tool
86. 86 Thursday, November 10, 11 using node.js as a Xdomain proxy for their api easier to write your own proxy in JS and better performant than ruby
87. 87 Thursday, November 10, 11 irc bot in node.js, logging, statistics
88. 88 Thursday, November 10, 11 github campfire chat bot easily scriptable to interact with anything, even hardware
89. 89 Thursday, November 10, 11 github component for repo archive packaging (zip, tarball) proxies data from fileservers into client
90. 90 Thursday, November 10, 11 node.js backend. awesome performance mostly gets data from other api’s
91. 91 Thursday, November 10, 11 no idea how they’re using node
92. 92 Thursday, November 10, 11 social network twitter style rewritten in node from netty (and cited as a netty performance example)
93. 93 Thursday, November 10, 11 walkie talkie app for smartphones, node.js backend c++ complex, python slow, large number of open connections
94. 94 Thursday, November 10, 11 locally hosted, realtime website traffic
95. That’s all folks! Questions? 95 Thursday, November 10, 11