The Dulin Report

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Strategic activity mapping for software architects May 25, 2025 On the role of Distinguished Engineer and CTO Mindset Apr 27, 2025 The future is bright Mar 30, 2025 Software Engineering is here to stay Mar 3, 2024 Some thoughts on recent RTO announcements Jun 22, 2023 Comparing AWS SQS, SNS, and Kinesis: A Technical Breakdown for Enterprise Developers Feb 11, 2023 Should today’s developers worry about AI code generators taking their jobs? Dec 11, 2022 Things to be Thankful for Nov 24, 2022 Book review: Clojure for the Brave and True Oct 2, 2022 Monolithic repository vs a monolith Aug 23, 2022 Scripting languages are tools for tying APIs together, not building complex systems Jun 8, 2022 There is no such thing as one grand unified full-stack programming language May 27, 2022 Most terrifying professional artifact May 14, 2022 Best practices for building a microservice architecture Apr 25, 2022 True identity verification should require a human Mar 16, 2020 On elephant graveyards Feb 15, 2020 TDWI 2019: Architecting Modern Big Data API Ecosystems May 30, 2019 Returning security back to the user Feb 2, 2019 Which AWS messaging and queuing service to use? Jan 25, 2019 Using Markov Chain Generator to create Donald Trump's state of union speech Jan 20, 2019 The religion of JavaScript Nov 26, 2018 Leaving Facebook and Twitter: here are the alternatives Mar 25, 2018 When politics and technology intersect Mar 24, 2018 TypeScript starts where JavaScript leaves off Aug 2, 2017 Node.js is a perfect enterprise application platform Jul 30, 2017 Rather than innovating Walmart bullies their tech vendors to leave AWS Jun 27, 2017 Architecting API ecosystems: my interview with Anthony Brovchenko of R. Culturi Jun 5, 2017 TDWI 2017, Chicago, IL: Architecting Modern Big Data API Ecosystems May 30, 2017 Apple’s recent announcements have been underwhelming Oct 29, 2016 Why I switched to Android and Google Project Fi and why should you Aug 28, 2016 Amazon Alexa is eating the retailers alive Jun 22, 2016 What can we learn from the last week's salesforce.com outage ? May 15, 2016 Why it makes perfect sense for Dropbox to leave AWS May 7, 2016 JEE in the cloud era: building application servers Apr 22, 2016 Managed IT is not the future of the cloud Apr 9, 2016 JavaScript as the language of the cloud Feb 20, 2016 OAuth 2.0: the protocol at the center of the universe Jan 1, 2016 Operations costs are the Achille's heel of NoSQL Nov 23, 2015 IT departments must transform in the face of the cloud revolution Nov 9, 2015 Banking Technology is in Dire Need of Standartization and Openness Sep 28, 2015 Top Ten Differences Between ActiveMQ and Amazon SQS Sep 5, 2015 We Live in a Mobile Device Notification Hell Aug 22, 2015 What Every College Computer Science Freshman Should Know Aug 14, 2015 The Three Myths About JavaScript Simplicity Jul 10, 2015 Book Review: "Shop Class As Soulcraft" By Matthew B. Crawford Jul 5, 2015 Your IT Department's Kodak Moment Jun 17, 2015 The longer the chain of responsibility the less likely there is anyone in the hierarchy who can actually accept it Jun 7, 2015 Smart IT Departments Own Their Business API and Take Ownership of Data Governance May 13, 2015 We Need a Cloud Version of Cassandra May 7, 2015 Building a Supercomputer in AWS: Is it even worth it ? Apr 13, 2015 Ordered Sets and Logs in Cassandra vs SQL Apr 8, 2015 Exploration of the Software Engineering as a Profession Apr 8, 2015 What can Evernote Teach Us About Enterprise App Architecture Apr 2, 2015 Why I am Tempted to Replace Cassandra With DynamoDB Nov 13, 2014 Infrastructure in the cloud vs on-premise Aug 25, 2014 Wall St. wakes up to underinvestment in OMS Aug 21, 2014 Cassandra: Lessons Learned Jun 6, 2014

Node.js is a perfect enterprise application platform

July 30, 2017

In a July 2017 article, Node.js Foundation surveyed developers around the world asking them how they use Node.js. As it turns out, Node.js is taking over the world of business applications and the enterprise by storm and is rapidly supplanting platforms like Java which has to do with a few factors.

JavaScript

Node.js is a JavaScript platform. JavaScript is a simple language that in and of itself is easy to learn. JavaScript opens up an opportunity for people with no formal computer science education to become productive as coders in a relatively short period.

API Mashups

Humanity tends to invent tools and build platforms on which we then make more complex tools and platforms. Consider the evolution of an enterprise developer.

Back when dinosaurs roamed the data centers, enterprise developers were writing financial systems in assembler. Over time, languages like PL/I and COBOL have invented that improved developer productivity. Eventually, we got Java, C++, C#, etc.

By now, enterprises built out API ecosystems supporting critical business processes. Add to the mix cloud APIs, and now we can rapidly develop new applications as API mashups.

As it turns out, JavaScript and Node.js form a fantastic API mashup platform.

Node.js performance

Node.js does not outperform Java at CPU and memory intensive tasks and probably never will. That is not where it shines, however.

Where it does outperform Java, however, is in IO-intensive use cases. For networked API-driven applications that are a yet another point in favor of Node.js as an API mashup platform.

Increased developer productivity

I remember the days when to build out a Java-based web server one had to get an application server like Tomcat, JBoss, WebLogic, or WebSphere. Those are expensive resource hogs.

As a Java engineer I’ve long advocated the approach of bypassing JEE application servers altogether. In Java, that is not trivial.

In Node.js, however, setting up an application server involves a handful lines of JavaScript code. Consider a simple “hello world” application server built using Node.js and express framework and compare it to doing this same using JBoss. Who wants to go through all that pain in Java, when in JavaScript all that is needed to get started is a few lines of code?

The perfect storm

The net result is that as new coders join the Node.js bandwagon because of JavaScript, the old school engineers coming from Java and other such platforms recognize the increased productivity features of Node.js. These two formidable forces combine to create the perfect storm. Enterprises are realizing that, and they are adopting Node.js as the platform for all new applications.