I really do think that, as time wears on, we will see more of these incidents of people switching from Node to another, more familiar development environment. It seems to me that a lot of people started using Node simply because of the amount of hype that surrounded it, and many of these decisions were not as well researched as they should've been.
Reading through this gentleman's blog post, it seems that, originally, Node was chosen for just one reason – he wanted to develop the entire application in JavaScript. Other than this, it does not seem that he took the time to research the Node development environment before deciding to develop his application in it.
With respect to the author of this post, the testing environment and the ease of developing a CRUD web application are things that should have been looked into before a single line of code intended for production had been written.
In addition to this, as several other commentators have already noted, Node is not directly comparable to Rails. Node is basically an event framework and standard library that bolts onto JavaScript. Node would be more comparable to something like Python's Twisted or Ruby's EventMachine. The author was probably using one of the frameworks available in Node such as Express.js, Railway.js, or Geddy.
It seems to me a lot of this starts with "I have a general idea, and I want to get it off the ground ASAP" and transitions to "I have a focused idea, and can now revise the project accordingly"
I see nothing wrong with that, as long as everyone involved recognizes the cost of rewriting/replacing large chunks later. If you're on a super tight schedule and don't want to write anything but JS, and you can afford to make revisions later (assuming the thing even catches on!) it strikes as pragmatic.
Actually since the app was developed at startup weekend which gives you 54 hours to make a presentable demo, I'd say testing was not the first thing on their mind.
And it's generally nowhere near 54 hours... more like 42. We nominally started at 6pm on Friday night, but teams weren't formed until 9-10pm. Pitches were demoed Sunday afternoon, and 48 hours from the start on Friday - Sunday at 6pm, it was all over. I've no clue why they SW fixates on the "54 hours" number. 42 would be far closer to the truth, but perhaps more intimidating for people?
Plus if they already knew rails. I use node mostly now and wonder why people would use anything else. However if i had alot of expertise in rails i would probably use it for most everything as well until i was comfortable enough with node.
Indeed, planning for 3 months to make sure you've done no wrong is much better than coding for a weekend, and determining then if you've made the right decision. Funding engineers for 3 months isn't all that expensive and everyone always makes the correct decision after 3 months of planning...
From my personal experience, Node is a really fun platform to quickly whip up a working web site/app/service over the weekend. But I keep getting this nagging feeling that it's not sustainable for a long term project with a large codebase. Other than socket.io, I really don't see Node as a general purpose web stack.
With respect to the author of this post, the testing environment and the ease of developing a CRUD web application are things that should have been looked into before a single line of code intended for production had been written.
Reading through this gentleman's blog post, it seems that, originally, Node was chosen for just one reason – he wanted to develop the entire application in JavaScript. Other than this, it does not seem that he took the time to research the Node development environment before deciding to develop his application in it.
With respect to the author of this post, the testing environment and the ease of developing a CRUD web application are things that should have been looked into before a single line of code intended for production had been written.
In addition to this, as several other commentators have already noted, Node is not directly comparable to Rails. Node is basically an event framework and standard library that bolts onto JavaScript. Node would be more comparable to something like Python's Twisted or Ruby's EventMachine. The author was probably using one of the frameworks available in Node such as Express.js, Railway.js, or Geddy.