Thoughts, Ideas, and Intrigue

Hello Nodejs

In my spare time, I love learning new technology and figuring out new methodologies to do something. Doing this helps me build a better understanding of how things work and allows me to solve new problems.

Why Node?

There were a few reasons why I chose to learn Node.
My friend Drew and I have been discussing about building a side project together. Since he works in Python / Django at his work, and I work in Ruby / Rails at mine, we thought a good compromise would be to do something we both would need to learn.
Since Node is written in javascript, that's something we both know are familiar in and would like to explore even further. It also doesn't hurt that Node is asynchronous and non-blocking in nature, so it would support websockets like socket.io natively. Awesome! :)

Struggles ensued.

We used expressjs as our web framework. Since nodejs is relatively new and the community/resources is limited, it took quite a while to figure out exactly how the MVC framework actually works.
Mongodb as our database, which is a bit different from the PostgreSQL and MySQL we have been used to, but turns out to be lightweight, fast, and efficient for our particular applicaiton.
And what the heck, since I heard so many good things about coffeescript, I decided to do that too. It turned out be such a joy to use compared to javascript, but that's just my preference.

Hello Node

Finally, I was able to create a simple hello world app, which I in turn changed into a dynamic todo app with minimal styling.