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JavaScript Node.js Basics (2014) Introduction to Node.js Why use Node.js?

Posted by sureshnarasimhan
sureshnarasimhan
Courses Plus Student 84 Points

Arent there other technologies that are Non Blocking ?

Does multiple threads in a web server (apache) or async http technologies like async http servlet (java) achieve the same goal?

6 Answers

Sang Han
Sang Han
1,257 Points
Sang Han
Sang Han
1,257 Points

There are a lot of programming languages that offer non-blocking or asynchronous programming.

  • NodeJS allows both synchronous and asynchronous programming, but you can never mix the two. Asynchronous functions return callbacks while synchronous ones return values.
  • Google Go was designed with asynchronously in mind, so all IO operations become non-blocking by design of the language.
  • With the release of Python 3.4 this year asynchronous io became a module in the standard library. But even before then, many 3rd party libraries and web frameworks like (tornado, gevent, twisted) all had implemented some form of asynchronous programming.
  • I'm not too familiar with Ruby on Rails (someone can correct me), but I think a lot of concurrency is done multi-threaded unlike the other ones I mentioned above.
Kostas Oreopoulos
Kostas Oreopoulos
15,184 Points
Kostas Oreopoulos
Kostas Oreopoulos
15,184 Points

Actually, from what i have been reading (trying to understand how nodejs works), when concurrency is the subject, nodejs is not in the top of the list.

I guess one of the best in concurrency is Go.

A nice slideshow with what is concurrency and what parallelism can be found here

Camila N
Camila N
10,677 Points
Camila N
Camila N
10,677 Points

Don't forget Erlang! In my list of programming languages to learn.

Ximena Castillo
PLUS
Ximena Castillo
Courses Plus Student 1,921 Points
Ximena Castillo
Ximena Castillo
Courses Plus Student 1,921 Points

Rails work with gems, so exists gems to make rails use multiple threads. Also .NET have a asynchronous way to work.

Regina Soifer
Regina Soifer
7,386 Points
Regina Soifer
Regina Soifer
7,386 Points

This is a must. Besides the valuable concepts there is also the historical value :)

Ryan Dahl: Original Node.js presentation https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztspvPYybIY

Codye Watson
Codye Watson
16,835 Points
Codye Watson
Codye Watson
16,835 Points

To make applications faster, I believe we should use Rubinius.

http://rubinius.com/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C5fa1LZYodQ