Node.js seems interesting as a backend technology because of its highly scalable nature. Also, it seems to be gaining steam in terms of developer mindshare. It is somewhat interesting to write in the same language on the front end as the backend, but then you are writing in JavaScript everywhere.

I wanted to play around with Node a bit, so I got the latest version of Node and installed by doing the standard download, unpack, ./configure, make, sudo make install. (Running on Ubuntu for kicks today.)

I thought about what things I might want to make and generally Googled around a bit. I got some ideas and a general lay of the land.

Then I said, “well there must be a Hello World app that I can play around with.” The node.js site had an example, so I copied it into a new Vim buffer. I ran it from the command line with node hello.js. There was a useful console message that was printed (as expected), and then I fired up localhost:1337 and got the expected “Hello World” message. I thought, “pretty easy!”

After getting this feedback, I took a little closer look at the code that I copied. I wondered what would happen when I commented out the res.writeHead line, and then thought it might not be visible, so wondered what would happen if I changed the Hello World line, which would more immediately tell me if my server was looking at file changes or not. I changed the string to “Hello Worlds” and refreshing the page did not change the string. Terminating the server and starting it again worked though. I thought, “this is not sustainable in the long run” and hunted for something to automatically watch for file changes.

I am familiar with guard in Ruby-land, and could have used this somehow. But I figured this was probably a solved problem and wanted to stay in Node-land. A quick search showed that using supervisor is a decent way to go (for now at least.)

NPM modules seemed interesting, so I took a look at the highest-used projects on the NPM site. These are things that will be useful going forward.

I navigated to the Node.js official documentation, and started playing around with some of the functions. I wondered if console.error would print out red to the console. I was slightly disappointed to see that it did not (although this makes sense, wouldn’t want too much color logging.) I searched around for Node console color, and found some interesting git repos, but decided not to explore this much more.

Then I was thinking, CoffeeScript would be useful. I had played around with this for Kyle and I’s Generic Space Shooter demo. I copied my current file to another one with a .coffee extension, and converted to CoffeeScript. Then I realized that supervisor probably wasn’t going to cut it. I used coffee -w to watch the file for changes, but I got an exception when I changed the file. Hunted around a bit more and found nodemon which proved to be a better solution for reloading.

Kept scrolling down the main Node documentation. Noted the section on modules and such, and figured this was a good time to try to get code in another file imported. Thought I would have made things harder by using CoffeeScript, but it turned out to not be the case. As soon as I saw the export function, I was thinking there were some things going on that the documentation didn’t adequately explain. Probably scrolling a bit more would have helped, but I saw this post and it helped to understand a couple of cases and trade-offs.

My new module just exported a function that takes a parameter and logs the parameter to the node console. However, when I tested it in the server request, I got two messages where I expected one. I searched for “node http createserver called twice” and got a helpful StackOverflow post. I ran the debug statement suggested, and it was indeed getting the favicon as well as the normal hit.

Skimmed through the rest of the official documentation, and saw a lot of things that looked like other language base constructs. Tried to focus mostly on stable features. Called it a night.

Pros so far:

• easy to install packages
• well documented so far
• quick feedback cycles
• modules are not hard to use or create

Next project ideas:

• Chat application (seems to be the next level up of hello world)
• Playing around with Express and seeing what other frameworks are out there for building apps
• Integrating with Backbone and/or persistence (I have a sample project in mind for this, Backbone + Pivotal Tracker)

Meta

I kind of like this format for exploring new technologies. Basically I just create a running “stream of consciousness” of what I am thinking about and working on. It helps me remember what I am doing, where I get stuck, and prevents me from getting bogged down on small details for too long.