The nodejs growing very fast recently. New library or framework added to nodejs almost everyday, since it is very easy to build a nodejs based module and javascript is used very widely.
I have done the A/B testing of nodeJS vs Erlang mochiweb, Erlang misultin, Nginx static page on my poor VM machine, and got the following result:
Nodejs helloworld: 724 qps
Erlang mochiweb helloworld: 430 qps
Erlang misultin helloworld: 690 qps
Nginx static page: 1045 qps
You can see that nodeJS is bloody fast thanks to the good performance of V8 JavaScript engine.
Talk about server side javascript, you should say Rhino, but nodejs is 20x faster than Rhino. NodeJS is stable, and not seen a bug of the code, like Nginx. You can build asynchronous system based on nodeJS and drop Tornado. What is important is that you can reuse your code both on client side and server side.
NodeJS is good at heavy IO usage, but not heavy CPU usage. And you should not change your current web system to nodeJS since it is too young.You can build your JSON interface by NodeJS, construct JSON from data fetched from database or remote web service, output the JSON format result.
Nodejs library:
npm — A node package manager that uses CommonJS-compatible package.json files, written in asynchronous JavaScript.
Express — A robust feature rich web development framework inspired by Sinatra
nodemachine — A port of WebMachine to Node.js
Connect — A middleware framework for node
Socket.io — WebSocket-compatible server and client with fallback for legacy browsers
node-mysql — A node.js module implementing the MySQL protocol
redis2json — Easily loads data from Redis into structured JS object
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