#Presentation: Node.js by Sam Shull

Last updated: September 09, 2010


Sam Shull presenting Node.js from Tim Novinger on Vimeo.

→ view slides

Node.js is all the buzz at the moment, and makes creating high performance, real-time web applications easy. It allows JavaScript to be used end to end, both on the server and on the client.

JavaScript has traditionally only run in the web browser, but recently there has been considerable interest in bringing it to the server side as well, thanks to the CommonJS project. Other server-side JavaScript environments include Jaxer and Narwhal. However, Node.js is a bit different from these solutions, because it is event-based rather than thread based. Web servers like Apache that are used to serve PHP and other CGI scripts are thread based because they spawn a system thread for every incoming request. While this is fine for many applications, the thread based model does not scale well with many long-lived connections like you would need in order to serve real-time applications like Friendfeed or Google Wave.