Yet another post about how Node.js is faster than Java.
For the sake of argument, let’s agree that big companies choosing and backing node.js means that it’s safe for us to pick it. And if that isn’t sufficient reason, the 50K modules available definitely should persuade us. Of course, we won’t question how many out of those 50K are currently active, not abandoned, and written perfectly using asynchronous non-blocking code.
Let’s just pretend it’s all good and it’s scalable. Damn scalable.
It’s not all about scale
The reality is, not everyone is creating the next Twitter or Facebook or the application that needs to scale to hundreds of millions of users accessing it concurrently, and then be sold to Twitter or Facebook.
And yet, lately it seems that every technology, every language, every framework is being sold to us based on its scalability merits.
Frameworks have become about scalability. Languages have become about concurrency. Databases have become about scale.
Even every other conference session is now about scalability.
And then of course there’s Big Data in case everything else fails to convince us we need to scale.
Also, it’s not all about scale
The flip-side of all this is that so much focus on scalability often detracts other merits of certain technologies.
I started using CouchDB because I was tired of database migrations amongst other things.
I started using node.js because I was tired of ceremony of more traditional frameworks I was using to at the time. And to a certain extent, I like JavaScript.
I started using AngularJS because I was tired of doing the same crap over and over again by hand. And I didn’t discard AngularJS or any client-side framework when I was told that Twitter did so because, “it doesn’t scale”.
It’s not all about scale.