I’m not so sure about that. I see node getting more and more traction these days. In 2012 it was a hipster tech, in 2018 it’s actually starting to see its way into production. At least around here, my own place included.
We’re a .net shop, like half the country I live in, but I could’ve written a somewhat similar story as the author. Not exactly similar, I don’t think NPM is really better than maven or nuget and coming from .net, the IDEs for JS are certainly weaker than they are for .Net.
The reason we’re doing more and more JS, and using node, is because of how fast it produces stuff that works.
It’s simply faster to write the same functionality with JS and node than it is in .net, and it gives us the advantage of only using one language for back-end, front-end and mobile. Which is extremely useful for a small team in an enterprise setup.
It also works everywhere. We’re a .net shop like I said, that means we run on IIS, which can be done with other techs than .net through stuff like fastcgi, but have you ever tried setting that up and keeping it up-to-date? I have, and really showed me how little of an operations guy I am because it was horrible. IIS-node on the other hand worked out the box.
It’s a little ironic, but it’s now easier for us to deploy Node apps than .net apps because .net apps often need different configuration on the IIS than it does on your development box and Node works exactly the same.
It’s mostly the easy, fast part that does it for us though, and not so much the language or node itself. We’re simply more productive when we’re using Node.
Of course you need a lot of governance with the JS stack, but you honestly need that for any tech, and we already had pretty strict rules in place for how we write things in .net.
Disclaimer, it’s entirely possible that we are not as good at .net as we think. It’s also possible that I’m noticing Node in more places than I did in 2012, or 2016 for that matter, places because I’m more focused on it now that we use it in production. Node is a rising trend throughout my network though, with more and more people picking it up for stuff that isn’t just weekend projects.
We have, I haven’t personally done any of it in production because I didn’t really see a reason to use it over node. My coworkers did a few pocs though, and initially had to spend a lot of time actually getting it to work with deployment. I have no idea why that was, you’d expect it to just work considering it’s a complete Microsoft setup, but it didn’t work out.
So it was a terribly expensive poc, because our most expensive resource is the time developers/operations spend. I mean, core is more performant than node technically, but as far as cost-efficiency goes, time to market is just much more important than technical performance in our organization. We have a lot of iron, and we don’t have a lot of users. We’re a muniplacity of average size after all, the most simultaneous visitors we’ve ever had across every system we operate is in the tens of thousands.
As far as development goes, I don’t think there is much difference between core and standard, but I’ll admit that I haven’t looked into it since 1.0.
We’re in this weird spot where we’re using more and more powershell and azure orchestration for back-end services that used to be powered by C#. A lot of that has also moved from development to operations, so that development is mainly focused on building APIs, working with data-sets or building various minor web/mobile apps, and Node + JS is just working out better than everything else.
We’ve tried core, we’ve tried Django and flask, we’ve tried a bunch of other stuff, but for getting an app up and running the same hour you start building it? Well, node just works for us.
I’m not saying node or JS are better than .Net though, I don’t think it is and I’d still prefer Java or C# if I was building something major.
