Node.js alone or as a companion to another server tool

Question

For my final year project at University I'm going to be creating an application which will use Node.js to send messages to update the position of a set of elements on the screen.

Detailed description of my goal:

A user should be able to create a room, a room can contain custom widgets such as pictures, ideas, music and video.

Other users should be able to view this users room, and comment on these widgets, like them, tweet about them etc. All widgets are movable and have an x,y coordinate and this will be broadcast every time an element is moved (using websockets).

A widget can be deleted or edited by the owner, this will update the element (once again websockets).

There will also be a built in chat feature to allow users to talk (in real time, using web sockets).

The widget details will be stored in a database

There is more functionality which isn't relevant to web sockets so I've omitted it.

The following image demonstrates what i'm building : (sorry about the size!) http://jtbrown.me.uk/assets/unrelated/mindcloud.jpg

I've really only got two questions:

1. Would I be better off using node on its own? (I'm not experienced in server side JavaScript)

2. Is it feasible to combine it with another web server such as Zend?

Answer 1

You should be able to do this in node alone, but maybe you want to use a basic web–framework based on node to make things a bit easier and to save time and work. I would recommend looking into ExpressJS or maybe even Zappa (based on ExpressJS) if you want to try out the excellent CoffeeScript .