Hi River, Long story short, I worked at a fairly small tech company that at the end of 2011 was bought by a much larger tech company that has been around for a long time (and has many of the expected tropes of an older, large tech company). Node was a significant part of two of the projects I worked on while at the company. One was released, and one is still in development. I'll comment on the one that was released.
how has your team approached the process of deploying node applications to > production (e.g. q.a./release process)? > QA was automated testing in node as much as possible. The company has a QA division with various softwares and processes, but I don't know how many node people would rather someone else do their testing for them. There are many great options for automated testing in node that are probably outside the scope of this reply :). Deployment to production was setting up a Debian 6 system, cloning the app from a private git repository and using forever as a daemon. what percentage of your user-facing service is backed by node? > The app's code is all node (except for the front end stuff and the database, which was couch), but if you mean all of the company's user facing services then probably a negligible percent, but that's not surprising. Why would an older company that trusts their stack switch to anything? > what gotchas have you encountered in adopting/maintaining/deploying node > applications? > Convincing others on the team that using a separate webserver and application do not have anything to do with reliability. > do you use something like express for your application infrastructure, or > something else (geddy, tower)? > The application was built in express for two main reasons: 1. I knew I would be leaving the company soon and wanted to build something popular, fairly simple, and well-documented. My hope was that someone who might be new to node would be able to pick up the app in the future and not have a difficult time working on it. Express isn't necessarily inherently this, but my hope was that this hypothetical person would get a lot of useful results on google :). 2. I disliked express, but felt that my dislike was irrational. Building an app using express would provide some more insight. what concerns do *you* have using node as a server-side technology? > I don't have any concerns, but I've heard many unfamiliar parties express concern with the event-loop being unreliable...with which I don't really even know how to start. It was like I was being told what I ate for lunch was unreliable. There are a lot of irrational anti-node arguments on the internet from people who don't actually use node and can be safely ignored. If you want to find out if node is a good match for the type of products your company wants to build then there's no better way than using it for a project or two and finding out. -- -- Job Board: http://jobs.nodejs.org/ Posting guidelines: https://github.com/joyent/node/wiki/Mailing-List-Posting-Guidelines You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "nodejs" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/nodejs?hl=en?hl=en
