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Node.js vs TypeScript: What are the differences?
Key Differences between Node.js and TypeScript
Node.js and TypeScript are both popular technologies used in web development. Here are the key differences between the two.
Language: Node.js is an open-source runtime environment that executes JavaScript outside of a web browser. It allows developers to build server-side and networking applications using JavaScript. On the other hand, TypeScript is a typed superset of JavaScript that adds static typing to the language, providing enhanced tooling and error checking.
Execution Environment: Node.js is a runtime environment that allows JavaScript code to be executed on the server-side, making it suitable for building scalable network applications. On the contrary, TypeScript is not an execution environment itself but a language that can be compiled into JavaScript that can then run in any browser or execution environment that supports JavaScript.
Type Safety: TypeScript introduces static typing, which enables developers to specify the types of variables, parameters, and return values. This helps catch errors during development and provides better code intelligence in editors. In contrast, Node.js, being JavaScript-based, does not have built-in support for static typing and relies on dynamic typing.
Scalability and Performance: Node.js is designed to handle large-scale, real-time applications with high concurrency, making it a good choice for building server-side applications with event-driven architectures. TypeScript, being a superset of JavaScript, inherits the scalability and performance advantages of JavaScript. However, the additional static typing in TypeScript can provide better optimization opportunities.
Community and Ecosystem: Node.js has a vast and active community along with a rich ecosystem of libraries and frameworks available to facilitate web development. The extensive range of modules in the npm registry makes it easy to find and incorporate dependencies into a Node.js project. TypeScript has also gained popularity and has a growing community, but its ecosystem is not as mature as Node.js.
Learning Curve: Node.js has a relatively low learning curve for JavaScript developers, as it leverages existing knowledge of JavaScript. TypeScript, on the other hand, introduces additional language features and concepts such as interfaces, generics, and decorators. Developers familiar with JavaScript can quickly understand TypeScript, but there might be a learning curve to fully utilize its advanced features.
In summary, Node.js is a runtime environment for executing JavaScript on the server-side, while TypeScript is a language that adds static typing and additional language features to JavaScript. Node.js is suitable for building network applications and has a mature ecosystem, while TypeScript provides enhanced type safety and allows for code optimizations, albeit with a slightly steeper learning curve.
I am starting a new project to build a simple ERP system for small businesses, where the owners can also manage orders on their phones.
I have decided to use JavaScript & React on the front-end and MySQL for the database. But I am really struggling to pick a backend language. I'm familiar with Node.js, but when I search for ERP (CRM & order mgt) projects on Youtube, I see that most build with Python (Django). Many also recommend Java.
So I'm a little confused. Please advice.
There is no problem to keep using node.js for your backend. Keep in mind that you already have expertise in it, so you could focus on development instead of to learn a new syntax/framework. There are good libraries in node.js that could help you in the development (services, validations, integrations, etc) also keeps you with a single language to the whole system. Django, as far as I know, it will provide a solid base for you, but it could be too much for your purpose, also could be more complex than you could need. Java provides to you many frameworks to simplify your integrations also could achieve a good performance. Anyway, I recommend you to follow using node.js, since you already know the syntax/platform.
Django is best suited for your requirement and has a very good community base to reach out for any queries. I have myself built and seen a lot of stuffs which match your requirement.
Hello, Node.js is simply a better option than python if you wish to make your application real-time operations. Also Node.js is a better choice than python for server side development.
But let's get your problem now. For most ERP projects, Node.js is a better choice. Also, since you are already familiar with Node.js, continue with it. Personally, I think Node.js is way better than Django mainly because JS is the god of ERP projects. Java is a good counterpart though.
I personally suggest NodeJs as you are also familiar with it. Even nodeJS has its own strong frameworks such as NestJS, Loopback etc. And the community is pretty much strong though. If you are looking for a faster development , then always you can go for NodeJS. And its pretty fast though.
Will you build it from scratch? There are some open source ERP/CRM solutions that you can use as a base for your solution. SugarCrm is an example. By looking at those, you can then decide which language you'll use for the backend.
I can recommend you a flexible constructor for this purpose. To create a system, you only need sql, and you can connect to any database without any problems. Please see the introductory article about the features, and if you are interested, I can provide access to the test site. My contacts for communication are on the site page https://falconspace.site/docs/vvedenie-v-falcon-space--c-chego-nachat https://falconspace.site/for-it
Hey if you are allready familar with nodejs then just go with it. There are some very nice frameworks out there that can be hold with the big ones.
Examples: AdonisJS or SailsJS
AdonisJS is even very similar like django.
Go with Node.js and use a framework. I can recommend NestJS or Fastifiy as a Backend Framework. They both have a strong community and Fastify is the successor of Express but much faster.
I prefer to use Node.js because you have experainse in it and also you can do anything for this language.
I am looking to make a website builder web app, where users can publish built websites with a custom or subdomain (much like Wix, Weebly, Squarespace, etc.), and I was wondering about any advice on which web framework to build it on? I currently know Node.js, but I would be excited to learn Laravel or Django if those would be better options. Any advice would be much appreciated!
The tools you mentioned are all backend focused frameworks. I will say, you can choose one of them as you may prefer (maybe Laravel and Django will be better since it's more organized than Node.js). But no matter what, if you will create a website builder application, today you'll need a frontend framework like Vue.js, React or Angular - or maybe Ember.js, Svelte and Meteor.
If you use Nodejs, you should use one more frontend language like reactjs or angularjs. Laravel is the better option. They are more power for rendering.
I am provided with the opportunity to learn one of these technologies during my training. I have prior experience with Spring and found it tough and still haven't figured out when to use what annotations among the thousands of annotations provided. On the other hand, I am very proficient in Java data structures and algorithms (custom comparators, etc.)
I have used Node.js and found it interesting, but I am wondering If I am taking the risk of choosing a framework that has a comparatively lesser scope in the future. One advantage I see with the node.js is the number of tutorials available and the ease with which I can code.
Please recommend which path to take. Is Spring learnable, or should I spend my energy on learning Node.js instead?
I do not know Spring or your company/specialty. Of course it must be learnable and I won't tell you to give up on anything. Java is and will remain valuable.
Regardless, I don't think "lesser scope" is a valid strike against Node.js here. Node.js fulfills JavaScript's original vision of an everywhere language and can run anywhere that Java can. It serves webpages, communicates with hardware, powers command line tools, and builds desktop applications. A huge complexity-saver for teams running many environments (my biggest regret is that it cannot run a microcontroller).
Node.js' biggest practical weakness is that JavaScript is less structured than Java. Luckily, the large influx of Java developers has been helping with this: gaps like constants and private properties are gradually filling in, and TypeScript firms up the types to the point where JavaScript looks a lot like Java.
Probably more potential competition from the larger pool of JS developers, but the compensation is allegedly similar so I guess there is a similar supply/demand situation.
hi this depends where you want to advance . If you want to work for an big aged company with a lot of legacy go the spring way (banks, insurances netflix etc ) if you want to go the new agile fast cloud way learn node js it is much more suited for cloud and micro service even spring cloud can do that as well but it is much more heavier
Hi. We are planning to develop web, desktop, and mobile app for procurement, logistics, and contracts. Procure to Pay and Source to pay, spend management, supplier management, catalog management. ( similar to SAP Ariba, gap.com, coupa.com, ivalua.com vroozi.com, procurify.com
We got stuck when deciding which technology stack is good for the future. We look forward to your kind guidance that will help us.
We want to integrate with multiple databases with seamless bidirectional integration. What APIs and middleware available are best to achieve this? SAP HANA, Oracle, MySQL, MongoDB...
ASP.NET / Node.js / Laravel. ......?
Please guide us
i recommended .NET because the library so rich, you can integrated any sources to computed , compiling, integrating, your apps to high complexity, easy to communicated with SAP BAPI. used Oracle DB, Cheers.
I would like to share my stack in Web/Mobile application Development for Mid Sized Applications.
Project-1 : Laravel + jQuery + Android Java + IOS Swift
Project-2 : Node.js + React + React Native + Electron.
This is my current Stack, Can you comment on my selection and add your thoughts if my choice is a perfect match? Thanks
I would say go for Node.js since you probably would only build a REST API that would talk to the frontend and some communication with the database.
On the other hand, Laravel is a much heavier framework that follows MVC pattern. Since you don't need the V in the MVC of Laravel. You can go for a straight Express that just handles the API request and return a response.
Hello Varun S,
Project-1 : If the Laravel part is an API, you should check Flutter or Quasar Framework for your frontend in order to reduce the development time and process.
Currently, I am a university student, and it is my second last semester with a major in Computer science. I want to start my career in full-stack web development. I know Python with Django + PHP with Laravel, and my focus is on learning MERN stack. I am a little bit confused as to which technology I should choose: Django or Magento or MERN stack.
#newbie
I suggest you to go with MERN Stack (Mongo,express,react,Node). As you know python and django which is a plus point because you can use python and node as your backend and for front-end use react(easy to learn) and database of your choice.(Mongo or SQL)
Currently working on my company's new saas, the main goal is to manage content and user. I'm familiar with the rails framework and how it is easy to code and deploy. The thing is I'm the only dev on the project, and in terms of the tech stack, there is no preference. However, because Node.js is everywhere and there is enough dev on the market, I am stuck between choosing Rails or Node.js. I don't mind implementing Vue.js or React on the frontend, but I need a solid argument to explain to people that aren't necessarily tech-savvy as to why we should choose Rails over Nodejs.
You are probably referring to ruby on rails for web development and nodejs for building the backend. Nodejs has frameworks such as express and next which not only provides a minimal code to build a backend but also gives the flexibility to try and experiment with the framework choices. For example you can have express framework + Passport for OAuth .... etc. The flexibility and the constant improvement of the language provides a good reason to opt for nodejs. Nodejs uses javascript which makes your code uniform when you are working full stack i.e react in front end and nodejs in backend.
I'd use the following metaphor to non-technical people. Rails is like a prepackaged toolkit, which can get most of the common tasks done fairly with ease. Whereas, node.js with whatever backend framekwork of choice, is like a DIY toolkit assembled by mix-and-match different tools in a large tool shop. Of course, at times DIY toolkit can do better on specific tasks. Given that you are the only dev on the project, I'd assume that the resource is fairly limited. And looks like you are not building some next-gen super duper fast smart application. So Just go with the prepackaged toolkit then. Rails is a very opinionated framework, there're pros and cons to it. But thanks to that, many of the gems are coded with it in mind. For example, they are all designed with same naming convention. Many will work well together out-of-box, for example devise and cancancan. Besides, many stuff are built in the framework. For example, logging utility, csrf protection, session encryption, etc. Yes, many of those stuff may not be useful or necessary at the beginning of the project life-cycle. However, down the road, there is a good chance you will need some of those. And the moment you realize that you already have it, it's so delightful. In addition, it's usually easier to debug a rails app than a node app in my experience. Personally, the cases where I would pick node.js over rails would be projects either require a) high-performance, or b) certain core functionality that has been implemented by some node packages but not by any ruby gems. In term of performance, node has a clear advantage over any other major web frameworks, except the ones built with go. It's simply a language feature. Node allows developer to easily write code that runs db query, external api calls, or other stuff of that nature in parallel. And that is THE MOST COMMON performance bottleneck of web applications.
Rails is currently a very mature and feature complete framework.
It's the ideal one if you're the only dev for your project because you get so many things already baked-in the framework that you'd only need to deeply care about specific stuff.
I won't say any NodeJS framework isn't good enough but in my experience with NodeJS frameworks you have to code a lot of the things Rails already provides. There's many people in Twitter and IRL asking for a "Rails for JavaScript" framework.
And you know? In the early stages of any project we have to validate it first with real users/customers. With Rails you can get to production real quick and fast.
I'm going to mention some of the features you get from day 1 when you run rails new app_name
:
- File uploading with Active Storage
- Rich text editor with Action Text
- Emailing with Action Mailer
- ORM, migrations, validations with Active Record
- Web sockets with Action Cable
- Internationalization
- Modern frontend stuff with Webpacker
and more.
The JavaScript community is on its moment, growing and gathering more people everyday but the Rails community is also a big one and there's always going to be a Rails developer to hire whenever you're ready to hire someone.
I suggest you to go with Rails because is a good choice, gives you less things to worry about and it's a very good and mature framework.
I hate to admit it, because I loved my time with Rails (and I still love the framework), I have a hard time justifying new Rails applications these days. Core team has made some tragic design decisions, and developers just don't perceive it as being "cool" any more. The latter is a terrible metric for which to base a technology decision, but I think you'll find it more difficult to recruit additional engineers if you choose Ruby on Rails.
Without knowing too much of the details, Node/Express (ideally with Typescript) seems like a better solution here, given you'll be building out the front-end in Vue or React. It might be worth looking at NestJS, as it's the closest I've seen to a well-formed opinionated framework on the Node side of things. We're also fans of Objection ORM.
I hope that's helpful!
I need a solid argument to explain to people that aren't necessarily tech-savvy as to why we should choose Rails over Nodejs
Hi Max, it sounds like that you are proficient in both stacks and probably have a higher expertise in Rails (correct me if I am wrong) and since you are the only dev on a project, a good argument that comes to mind is probably the velocity and maturity (enterprise grade, battle tested in production) that Rails provide with proven success stories in the tech industry such as Airbnb, Stripes, Shopify to name a few. You can also make the argument that Rails is great to run the backend and React+Vue (and nodejs for tooling) is ideal for the front-end development (see or find companies example that use both). You can also build and show a prototype using both and share your experience which could help you find and forge the selling points to those non tech savvy folks, why not.
Eventually, are you going to have other developers on your project? if yes then you will need to take in account, onboarding and ramp up to contribution time when they are hired.
IMHO, I am not a fan of the debate Rails vs Nodejs, they are just tools at the disposal of the developer it's just a matter of figuring out what makes the most sense.
Let me know if you wanna discuss further, happy to help out!
ps: markdown preview on stack share... no good.
Rails has advantages over node.js (specifically express) when working a more complicated backend. While Express has some speed advantages to Rails, this is mitigated if your software is more CPU intensive.
I have learned both Python and JavaScript. I also tried my hand at Django. But i found it difficult to work with Django, on frontend its Jinja format is very confusing and limited. I have not tried Node.js yet and unsure which tool to go ahead with. I want an internship as soon as possible so please answer keeping that in mind.
If you are currently not working my first suggestion is to study both the frameworks and get a good grasp of those. If you didn't get confident with Django in the first place you should reconsider going back and study more. Get a video course with some code-along and produce some simple application you can showcase on your interviews. If you already took a course take a different one. Another trainer could be more effective and you could experience something new with different excercises. There are lots of both free and paid courses out there. When you will get confident with Django get your feet wet with Node.js because it surely worth it. Node is very different from Django from some perspective, it looks more like an asynchronous version of Flask to me. Be sure to have a good knowledge of ES6 first, because it will be really useful to understand the Node best practices. Study as much as you can now if you are not working. It will supercharge you for the future...
From my experience of the early startup world, a majority of companies these days use Node.js. Python and Go are the next biggest languages, but significantly smaller than Node.
However, if you're having trouble with the front end aspect of Django, using Node probably won't make that easier for you. You'll have a lot more options between front end frameworks (React, Vue.js, Angular 2) , but they'll definitely take more time to learn than Django's templating system.
Think about whether you want to focus on front end or back end for now, and make a decision from there.
I had the same question myself a few months ago. I finally chose Node.js, and it was one of the best options I did back then. From when I started programming, I always believed that Python was for me the best language, secure and stable. However, it is not flexible for web development, there are more packages & libraries that are built and work only with JavaScript / TypeScript, and the community, resources & support is much bigger. I was also fascinated by the Django ORM, which I still am, & the admin interface. But those are things, that can be replaces by other tools, such as TypeORM, and the admin interface was not needed at all finally for my case. I know understand that Python is not the language that I should use everywhere and every time, but I can say that it is really good for algorithms, computer science, maths, statistics, analytics & AI. To be honest, I chose TypeScript (TS) with Node.js & Express, because it has auto-completion and "strict" code checking. I hope this helps you, and let you take a look at various aspects of choosing a programming language to work with.
Jinja is a template rendering engine and you will encounter some sort of template rendering engine in each language. Jinja is a pretty standard tool and almost every language has some sort of Jinja equivalent. Ruby has Liquid, Node has Nunjucks, Java has Jinjava, Go's default templating engine is easy to pick up if you know Jinja, Helm charts are easier to pick if know Jinja . So learning Jinja is a good thing.
I would suggest to go with js, it's the craze now when you enter into the stack it has variety of options and tools that you can adopt , and more than that the demand for js engineers is exponentially increasing and js can do magic in any type of application or architecture.
Actually, you could get very good solution with implementing BE and admin panel with Django and FE with React.js or Vue.js. it will provide you a pretty flexible and powerful environment.
If you already know some django stuff you should keep that learning path. And for the job if you really want an internship you should learn to make rest APIs using django or nodejs, and a front end that consumes those APIs using some framework
I'm planning with a small team to create an application which is a platform for restaurants. I'm on the backend almost alone currently. I'm going to use Node.js for that, and I'm very fond of TypeScript, and I worked before mostly with ExpressJS. The team may get bigger as the application becomes bigger and more successful, so I have the Scalability concern in mind now, and I was considering these options: 1) Use Node+Express+Typescript 2) Use Node+NestJs (which utilizes Typescript by default)
Option 2 is enticing to me because recently I came to love NestJS and it provides more scalability for the project and uses Typescript in the best way and uses Express under the hood. Also I come from an Angular 2 background, which I think is the best frontend framework (my opinion, and I know React quite well), which makes Nest feel familiar to me because of the similarity between Nest and Angular. Option 1 on the other hand uses Express which is a minimalist framework, very popular one, but it doesn't provide the same scalability and brings decision fatigue about what to combine with it and may not utilize Typescript in the best way. Yet, on the other hand, it is flexible and it may be easier to manipulate things in different ways with it. Another very important thing is that it would be easier in my view to hire Node developers with skills in Express than NestJs. The majority of Node developers are much more familiar with JavaScript and Express.
What is your advice and why? I would love to hear especially from developers who worked on both Express and Nest
I highly recommend NestJS because:
- It's a framework you already like;
- Typescript is growing fast, being increasingly adopted in the community;
- All layers are well defined, not needing to think much about the organization;
- Great documentation;
- Nest CLI increases the development speed and keep the pattern;
Only using express and knowing that project can grow, you'ill need to define the structure well so that it doesn't get out of control.
Hi Louai,
I am quite sure that you know the answer to your problem. And I am here to help you to follow your arrow. I have worked with the most popular Nodejs frameworks and I can sure you that there's no stack better than NestJS (at all). Typescript is the best thing that happened with Javascript, this is a fact. Ans NestJS make a such wonderful job using all the best Typescript tools. NestJS is the most mature and organized API manager. Its modular dependence injection, the use of DDD, the solid idea of single responsibility, it's unit a and e2e testing support, its documentation is the most incredible work in the world of Nodejs. You won't regret choosing this framework, even if your application grows a lot. If you follow the documentation tips you will be able to create an amazing and organized application.
ps: I am not part of the NestJS team, I am just a guy tired of wasting time with dumb and bad Frameworks and its bad documentations. I find relief in NestJS with all the time it's saved to me, it helped me to improve my job and let me create great things with Nodejs.
Hi, I'm in a similar position, but related to personal projects. After falling in love with few frameworks in the first day and rejecting them in day 2, I started learning nestJS last week. I currently develop personal side projects using cakephp, and I intend to migrate to nest + vue. This week I'm taking a nestJS course in order to be sure that this is what I want by praticing a little. If you didn't do it yet, I suggest you try to code a todo app or a similar example API using nest, so you can "feel" if this is indeed what you want to use in this larger-scale project.
Some of the characteristics that got my attention to nestJS are typescript, a lot of annotations/decorations, an oppinionated approach to organizing the project, nice documentation and discord, and it's evolution at npm trends shows me it's probably not going to vanish or get buggy anytime soon.
I would definitely suggest NestJs over other options because NestJs gives a lot of tooling. it would definitely suggest NestJs over other options because NestJs gives a lot of tooling & it gives a lot of functionality out of the box. If your team worked with angular 2+ then it will really easy to learn.
First of all, my experience using either Node.js with Express or NestJS is not wide. I liked NestJS due to it's similarity to Angular, so when you know Angluar and like TypeScript you are going to love NestJS, it will be instantly very familiar and easy to use, it's adds a good structure to the project out of the box and well, it uses TypeScript, which is a more structured language - it's good for scalability. As for performance concern s - NestJS is based on Node, it just brings Angular's modular structure to it, so the question is more about how is the additional layer influences the performance - I cannot answer that.
Have you checked out Hapi as an alternative? I'ts not Typescript by default though. If that doesn't seem too interesting, it sounds like you want to go with NestJS :)
Hi, I am looking to select tech stack for front end and back end development. Considering Spring Boot vs Node.js for developing microservices. Front end tech stack is selected as React framework. Both of them are equally good for me, long term perspective most of services will be more based on I/O vs heavy computing. Leaning toward node.js, but will require team to learn this tech stack, so little hesitant.
It's probably worth investing some time for your team to learn Node.js. There's very little overhead, especially with a framework like ExpressJS, so if your team is familiar with JavaScript it should be a quick process.
It handles I/O really well out of the box, and has a strong community with great open source libraries. Since you're using React on the front end, there's also some benefit to being able to use JavaScript throughout your stack.
We choose Next.js for our React framework because it's very minimal and has a very organized file structure. Also, it offers key features like zero setups, automatic server rendering and code splitting, typescript support. Our app requires some loading time to process the video, server-side rendering will allow our website to display faster than client-side rending.
SQL or NoSQL?
As a general rule, I would recommend using the SQL database over NoSQL because:
- working with associations is way easier;
- you can write complex queries;
- rigid structure ensures data validation;
- more developers know how to work with it properly;
But while working on Diff Stories, we choose DynamoDB, and that's why.
Associations
The core object of our product is a Pull Request. All other entities, such as diff blocks, code comments, reviews, etc. are all parts of a pull request. It works really well with document-based storage like DynamoDB because we can save everything as one document, and no associations are needed.
Data structure
Another useful feature for us — JSON as a first-level citizen in DB. We represent a pull request as a set of pages with blocks and additional objects. It is very convenient to save it as a JSON. You can have JSON columns in Postgres, but it's more natural in NoSQL databases.
Connections
Our backend is a Node app written in Typescript. It is deployed serverless on AWS Lambdas. You can say that it's unnecessarily, and you will be right :) But again, if you know how to use it properly, it might be useful. With DynamoDB, you don't have a limit of connections, and that's quite handy if you have serverless architecture.
Pricing (Bonus)
When you are just starting, you count every cent. DynamoDB is super cheap for small databases, and if you're building MVC or don't have many clients yet, it will be almost free for you. But be careful — once requirements for your DB increase, the price will increase too.
I'll be happy to discuss everything above in the comments :)
Meanwhile, you can visit us on Diff Stories
We actually initially wrote a lot of networking code in Kotlin but the complexities involved prompted us to try and compile NodeJS for Android and port over all the networking logic to Node and communicate with node over the Java Native Interface.
This turned out to be a great decision considering our battery usage fell by 40% and rate of development increased by a factor of 2.
As a small team, we wanted to pick the framework which allowed us to move quickly. There's no option better than Rails. Not having to solve the fundamentals means we can more quickly build our feature set. No other framework can beat ActiveRecord in terms of integration & ease-of use. To top it all of, there's a lot of attention paid to security in the framework, making almost everything safe-by-default.
We're still using JavaScript and Node.js, but try to stick with TypeScript for new services and modules. About the benefits of static typing much has been written, in short it:
- offers better maintainability and discoverability of existing code bases
- provides reasonable type safety, which frees us from writing a huge chunk of unit tests and mitigates a large set of problems that are caught in compilation
- affords a new level of expressiveness via types
Nothing is without trade offs; we are aware of, and accept that:
- fighting the compiler can be frustrating
- it adds to the already large list of skills a web developer has to learn
- it adds another piece to the already large set of tools necessary to get code from development to production
Hey guys,
My backend set up is Prisma / GraphQL-Yoga at the moment, and I love it. It's so intuitive to learn and is really neat on the frontend too, however, there were a few gotchas when I was learning! Especially around understanding how it all pieces together (the stack). There isn't a great deal of information out there on exactly how to put into production my set up, which is a backend set up on a Digital Ocean droplet with Prisma/GraphQL Yoga in a Docker Container using Next & Apollo Client on the frontend somewhere else. It's such a niche subject, so I bet only a few hundred people have got a website with this stack in production. Anyway, I wrote a blog post to help those who might need help understanding it. Here it is, hope it helps!
we went with typescript because it gave us more control over our classes and the variables. This allowed us to build standards and to make sure everyone was following it properly as well as made it easier to send standard data across and validate it. If we just went with pure Node.js this allows for a lot of flexibility with the variables which made it much harder to keep everything consistent and validate it. Also, the benefit of using TypeScript and having that validation is writing less code than just doing it javascript manually
This basically came down to two things: performance on compute-heavy tasks and a need for good tooling. We used to have a Meteor based Node.js application which worked great for RAD and getting a working prototype in a short time, but we felt pains trying to scale it, especially when doing anything involving crunching data, which Node sucks at. We also had bad experience with tooling support for doing large scale refactorings in Javascript compared to the best-in-class tools available for Java (IntelliJ). Given the heavy domain and very involved logic we wanted good tooling support to be able to do great refactorings that are just not possible in Javascript. Java is an old warhorse, but it performs fantastically and we have not regretted going down this route, avoiding "enterprise" smells and going as lightweight as we can, using Jdbi instead of Persistence API, a homegrown Actor Model library for massive concurrency, etc ...
I was researching multiple high performance, concurent//parallel languages for the needs of authentication and authorization server, to be built on microservice architecture and Linux OS. Node.js with its asynchronous behavior and event loop suits the case best. Python Django & Flash turns to be slower and .NET Core & Framework wasn't the best choice for the Linux environment at the time (summer 2018).
I also tested Go lang and Rust, although they didn't meet the quick prototyping criteria as both languages are young and lacking libraries or battle-tested ORM.
As our codebase grew in size, we were looking for ways to improve code quality. We chose TypeScript over Flow due to its rapid industry adoption and overall tools support.
We noticed how different open-source projects were migrating from Flow to TypeScript. Most notably, it was Jest, even though Jest and Flow were both developed by Facebook. See this HN thread if you want to dive into an interesting discussion around this move.
Additionally, at the beginning of 2019, both Babel and ESLint enabled seamless TypeScript support, which allowed easy migration path in a backward-compatible way.
Pros of Node.js
- Npm1.4K
- Javascript1.3K
- Great libraries1.1K
- High-performance1K
- Open source805
- Great for apis486
- Asynchronous477
- Great community423
- Great for realtime apps390
- Great for command line utilities296
- Websockets84
- Node Modules83
- Uber Simple69
- Great modularity59
- Allows us to reuse code in the frontend58
- Easy to start42
- Great for Data Streaming35
- Realtime32
- Awesome28
- Non blocking IO25
- Can be used as a proxy18
- High performance, open source, scalable17
- Non-blocking and modular16
- Easy and Fun15
- Easy and powerful14
- Future of BackEnd13
- Same lang as AngularJS13
- Fullstack12
- Fast11
- Scalability10
- Cross platform10
- Simple9
- Mean Stack8
- Great for webapps7
- Easy concurrency7
- Typescript6
- Fast, simple code and async6
- React6
- Friendly6
- Control everything5
- Its amazingly fast and scalable5
- Easy to use and fast and goes well with JSONdb's5
- Scalable5
- Great speed5
- Fast development5
- It's fast4
- Easy to use4
- Isomorphic coolness4
- Great community3
- Not Python3
- Sooper easy for the Backend connectivity3
- TypeScript Support3
- Blazing fast3
- Performant and fast prototyping3
- Easy to learn3
- Easy3
- Scales, fast, simple, great community, npm, express3
- One language, end-to-end3
- Less boilerplate code3
- Npm i ape-updating2
- Event Driven2
- Lovely2
- Creat for apis1
- Node0
Pros of TypeScript
- More intuitive and type safe javascript174
- Type safe106
- JavaScript superset80
- The best AltJS ever48
- Best AltJS for BackEnd27
- Powerful type system, including generics & JS features15
- Compile time errors11
- Nice and seamless hybrid of static and dynamic typing11
- Aligned with ES development for compatibility10
- Angular7
- Structural, rather than nominal, subtyping7
- Starts and ends with JavaScript5
- Garbage collection1
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Cons of Node.js
- Bound to a single CPU46
- New framework every day45
- Lots of terrible examples on the internet40
- Asynchronous programming is the worst33
- Callback24
- Javascript19
- Dependency hell11
- Dependency based on GitHub11
- Low computational power10
- Very very Slow7
- Can block whole server easily7
- Callback functions may not fire on expected sequence7
- Breaking updates4
- Unstable4
- Unneeded over complication3
- No standard approach3
- Bad transitive dependency management1
- Can't read server session1
Cons of TypeScript
- Code may look heavy and confusing5
- Hype4