Sitting on the Node.js Fence

I am a long standing fan of Garrison Keillor and his Prairie Home Companion. I fondly remember a Saturday in which he delivered his widely popular News From Lake Wobegon, and that contained the following conundrum: “Is ambivalence a bad thing? Well, yes and no”. It also accurately explains my feeling towards Node.js and the exploding Node community.

As I am writing this, I can hear the great late Joe Strummer singing Should I Stay or Should I Go in my head (“If I stay it will be trouble, if I go it will be double”). It is really hard to ignore the passion that Node.js has garnered from its enthusiastic supporters, and if the list of people you are following on Twitter is full of JavaScript lovers, Node.js becomes Kim Kardashian of your Twitter feed (as in, every third tweet is about it).

In case you were somehow preoccupied by, say, living life to the fullest to notice or care about Node.js, it is a server-side framework written in JavaScript sitting on a bedrock of C++, compiled and executed by Google’s Chrome V8 engine. A huge cottage industry sprung around it, and whatever you may need for your Web development, chances are there is a module that does it somewhere on GitHub. Two years ago, in a widely re-tweeted event, Node.js overtook Ruby on Rails as the most watched GitHub repository.

Recently, in a marked trend of maturation from exploration and small side projects, some serious companies started deploying Node into production. I heard everything about how this US Thanksgiving most traffic to Walmart.com was from mobile devices, handled by Node.js servers.

https://twitter.com/jetpack/status/406674414877433856

Then I heard from Nick Hart how PayPal switched from JEE to Node.js. A few months ago I stumbled upon an article about Node.js taking over the enterprise (like it or not, to quote the author). I am sure there are more heartwarming stories traded at a recent #NodeSummit. Still, not to be carried away, apart from mobile traffic, Node.js only serves a tiny panel for the Walmart.com web site, so more of a ‘foot in the door’ than a total rewrite for the desktop. Even earlier, LinkedIn engineering team blogged about their use of Node.js for LinkedIn Mobile.

It is very hard to cut through the noise and get to the core of this surge in popularity. When you dig deeper, you find multiple reasons, not all of them technical. That’s why discussions about Node.js sometimes sound to me like the Abott and Costello’s ‘Who’s on First’ routine. You may be discussing technology while other participants may be discussing hiring perks, or skill profile of their employees, or context switching. So lets count the ways why Node.js is popular and note how only one of them is actually technical:

1. Node.js is written from the ground up to be asynchronous. It is optimized to handle problems where there is a lot of waiting for I/O. Processing tasks not waiting for I/O while others are queued up can increase throughput without adding processing and memory overhead of the traditional ‘one blocking thread per request’ model (or even worse, ‘one process per request’). The sweet spot is when all you need to do is lightly process the result of I/O and pass it along. If you need to spend more time to do some procedural number-crunching, you need to spawn a ‘worker’ child process, at which point you are re-implementing threading.
2. Node.js is using JavaScript, allowing front-end developers already familiar with it to extend their reach into the server. Most new companies (i.e. not the Enterprise) have a skill pool skewed towards JavaScript developers (compared to the Enterprise world where Java, C/C++, C# etc. and similar are in the majority).
3. New developers love Node.js and JavaScript and are drawn to it like moths to a candelabra, so having Node.js projects is a significant attraction when competing for resources in a developer-starved new IT economy.

Notice how only the first point is actually engineering-related. This is so prevalent that it can fit into a tweet, like so:

Then there is the issue of storage. There have been many libraries made available for Node.js to connect to SQL databases, but that would be like showing up at an Arcade Fire concert in a suit. Oh, wait, that actually happened:

Never mind then. Back to Node.js: why not going all the way and use something like MongoDB, storing JSON documents and using JavaScript for DB queries? So now not only do front end developers not need to chase down server-side Java guys to change the served HTML or JSON output, they don’t have to chase DBAs to change the DB models. My point is that once you add Node.js, it is highly likely you will revamp your entire stack and architecture, and that is a huge undertaking even without deadlines to spice up your life with a wallop of stress (making you park in a wrong parking spot in your building’s garage, as I did recently).

Now let’s try to apply all this to a talented team in a big corporation:

1. The team is well versed in both Java (on the server) and JavaScript (on the client), and have no need to chase down Java developers to ‘add a link between pages’ as in the PayPal’s case. The team also knows how to write decent SQL queries and handle the model side of things.
2. The team uses IDEs chock-full of useful tools, debuggers, incremental builders and other tooling that make for a great workflow, particularly when the going gets tough.
3. The team needs to deliver something new on a tight schedule and is concerned about adding to the uncertainty of ‘what to build’ by also figuring out ‘how to build it’.
4. There is a fear that things that the team has grown to expect as gravity (debugging, logging etc.) is still missing or immature.
5. While there is a big deal made about ‘context switching’, the team does it naturally – they go from Java to JavaScript without missing a beat.
6. There is a whole slew of complicated licensing reasons why some Open Source libraries cannot be used (a problem startups rarely face).

Mind you, this is a team of very bright developers that eat JavaScript for breakfast and feel very comfortable around jQuery, Require.js, Bootstrap etc. When we overlay the reasons to use Node.js now, the only one that still remains is handling huge number of requests without paying the RAM/CPU tax of blocking I/O, one thread per request.

As if things were not murky enough, Servlets 3.1 spec supported by JEE 7.0 now comes with asynchronous processing of requests (using NIO) and also protocol upgrade (from HTTP/S to WebSockets). These two things together mean that the team above has the option of using non-blocking I/O from the comfort of their Java environment. They also mean that they can write non-blocking I/O code that pushes data to the client using WebSockets. Both things are currently the key technical reasons to jump ship from Java to Node. I am sure Oracle added both things feeling the heat from the Node.js, but now that they are here, they may be just enough reason to not make the transition yet, considering the cost and overhead.

Update: after posting the article, I remembered that Twitter has used Netty for a while now to get the benefit of asynchronous I/O coupled by performance of JVM. Nevertheless, the preceding paragraph is for JEE developers who can now easily start playing with async I/O without changing stacks. Move along, nothing to see here.

Then there is also the ‘Facebook effect’. Social scientists have noticed the emergence of a new kind of depression caused by feeling bad about your life compared to carefully curated projections of other people’s lives on Facebook. I am yet to see a posting like “my life sucks and I did nothing interesting today” or “I think my life is passing me by” (I subsequently learned that Sam Roberts did say that in Brother Down, but he is just pretending to be depressed, so he does not count). Is it possible that I am only hearing about Node.js success stories, while failed Node.js projects are quietly shelved never to be spoken of again?

Well, not everybody is suffering in silence. We all heard about the famous Walmart memory leak that is now thankfully plugged. Or, since I already mentioned MongoDB, how about going knee-deep into BSON to recover your data after your MongoDB had a hardware failure. Or a brouhaha about the MongoDB 100GB scalability warning? Or a sane article by Felix Geisendörfer on when to use, and more importantly, when NOT to use Node.js (as Node.js core alumnus, he should know better than many). These are all stories of the front wave of adopters and the inevitable rough edges that will be filed down over time. The question is simply – should we be the one to do that or somebody can do the filing for us?

In case I sound like I am justifying reasons why we are not using Node.js yet, the situation is quite the opposite. I completely love the all-JavaScript stack and play with it constantly in my pet projects. In a hilarious twist, I am acting like a teenage Justin Bieber fan and the (younger) team lead of the aforementioned team needs to bring me down with a cold dose of reality. I don’t blame him – I like the Node.js-based stack in principle, while he would have to burn the midnight oil making it work at the enterprise scale, and debugging hard problems that are inevitable with anything non-trivial. Leaving aside my bad case of FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out), he will only be persuaded with a problem where Node.js is clearly superior, not just another way of doing the same thing.

Ultimately, it boils down to whether you are trying to solve a unique problem or just play with a new and shiny technology. There is a class of problems that Node.js is perfectly suitable for. Then there are problems where it is not a good match. Leaving your HR and skills reasons aside, the proof is in the pudding (or as a colleague of mine would say, ‘the devil is in the pudding’). There has to be a unique problem where the existing stack is struggling, and where Node.js is clearly superior, to tip the scales.

While I personally think that Node.js is a big part of an exciting future, I have no choice but to agree with Zef Hemel that it is wise to pick your battles. I have to agree with Zef that if we were to rebuild something for the third time and know exactly what we are building, Node.js would be a great way to make that project fun. However, since we are in the ‘white space’ territory, choosing tried and true (albeit somewhat boring) building blocks and focusing the uncertainty on what we want to build is a good tradeoff.

And that’s where we are now – with me sitting on the proverbial fence, on a constant lookout for that special and unique problem that will finally open the Node.js floodgates for us. When that happens, you will be the first to know.

© Dejan Glozic, 2013