The Dulin Report

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Strategic activity mapping for software architects May 25, 2025 The future is bright Mar 30, 2025 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 Scripting languages are tools for tying APIs together, not building complex systems Jun 8, 2022 Java is no longer relevant May 29, 2022 Best practices for building a microservice architecture Apr 25, 2022 TypeScript is a productivity problem in and of itself Apr 20, 2022 In most cases, there is no need for NoSQL Apr 18, 2022 A year of COVID taught us all how to work remotely Feb 10, 2021 What programming language to use for a brand new project? Feb 18, 2020 Microsoft acquires Citus Data Jan 26, 2019 The religion of JavaScript Nov 26, 2018 Teleportation can corrupt your data Sep 29, 2018 Let’s talk cloud neutrality Sep 17, 2018 What does a Chief Software Architect do? Jun 23, 2018 TypeScript starts where JavaScript leaves off Aug 2, 2017 Node.js is a perfect enterprise application platform Jul 30, 2017 Design patterns in TypeScript: Chain of Responsibility Jul 22, 2017 Rather than innovating Walmart bullies their tech vendors to leave AWS Jun 27, 2017 TDWI 2017, Chicago, IL: Architecting Modern Big Data API Ecosystems May 30, 2017 Copyright in the 21st century or how "IT Gurus of Atlanta" plagiarized my and other's articles Mar 21, 2017 Online grocers have an additional burden to be reliable Jan 5, 2017 Don't trust your cloud service until you've read the terms Sep 27, 2016 In search for the mythical neutrality among top-tier public cloud providers Jun 18, 2016 What can we learn from the last week's salesforce.com outage ? May 15, 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 Our civilization has a single point of failure Dec 16, 2015 IT departments must transform in the face of the cloud revolution Nov 9, 2015 We Live in a Mobile Device Notification Hell Aug 22, 2015 What Every College Computer Science Freshman Should Know Aug 14, 2015 Book Review: "Shop Class As Soulcraft" By Matthew B. Crawford Jul 5, 2015 Attracting STEM Graduates to Traditional Enterprise IT Jul 4, 2015 Your IT Department's Kodak Moment Jun 17, 2015 Big Data is not all about Hadoop May 30, 2015 Smart IT Departments Own Their Business API and Take Ownership of Data Governance May 13, 2015 What can Evernote Teach Us About Enterprise App Architecture Apr 2, 2015 Microsoft and Apple Have Everything to Lose if Chromebooks Succeed Mar 31, 2015 On apprenticeship Feb 13, 2015 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.