Is using Node.js or Ringojs safe for live websites?

Question

As stated in the title, I would like to know if it's safe to develop a website using one of the actuals "omg" platforms that are Node.js and Ringo.js at their actual version.

Also, I would like to know if they support cookies/sessions and how do they deals with multi-fields post (fieldname[] in PHP).

Thank you

--Edit--

Thanks for all the links guys.

What can you tell me about Ringojs ?

Since I haven't figured which platform to start playing with. I must admit that the fact it can use Java seamlessly really impress me. The only available XSLT 2.0 library is in Java. I could use it as a templating system.

Is there anyone who had the chance to play with Ringojs?

Answer 1

From my experience using both, Ringo is more stable and "safer" for production use but you can comfortably deploy both. In addition to the ability to wrap existing Java libraries that you mention, you also get the benefit of being able to run it in an existing webapp container which manages the lifecycle of the application for you and ensures its availability.

That being said, it doesn't have to be an either or decision. By using my common-node package and assuming you don't use any Java libraries, it's perfectly feasible to maintain a project that runs on both without any changes to the code.

I've also included benchmarks that test the performance of Node.js vs. RingoJS the results of which you can find in the common-node/README.md. To summarize: RingoJS has slightly lower throughput than Node.js, but much lower variance in response times while using six times the RAM with default Java settings. The latter can be tweaked and brought down to as little as twice the memory usage of Node with eg my ringo-sunserver but at the expense of decreased performance.

Answer 2

Node.js is stable, so yes it's safe to use. Node.js is capable of handling cookies, sessions, and multiple fields but are not as easy to manage. Web frameworks solve this problem.

I recommend Express.js , it's an open-source web framework for Node.js which handles all of this and more.

You can download it here: https://github.com/visionmedia/express

I hope this helped!

Answer 3

Examples of some of the bigger sites running Node.js

• https://www.learnboost.com/
• http://ge.tt/
• https://gomockingbird.com/
• https://secured.milewise.com/
• http://voxer.com/
• https://www.yammer.com/
• http://cloud9ide.com/
• http://beta.etherpad.org/
• http://loggly.com/
• http://wordsquared.com/

Answer 4

Yes. It is. https://github.com/joyent/node/wiki/Projects,-Applications,-and-Companies-Using-Node and https://github.com/joyent/node/wiki/modules

cookies/sessions/forms etc http://expressjs.com/ makes it easier

Answer 5

Ringojs is a framework developed by Hannes Wallnöver and uses rhino as it's scripting framework. There are webframeworks, templating-engines, orm-packages and many many more things already available. Have a look at the tutorial featuring a good subset of packages you may use for a simple web-application. It's not too long and straightforward.

Even thought some of those packages used within the tutorial (eg ringo-sqlstore]) are marked as 0.8 and come with the hint "consider this being beta" they are already very stable and bugs - if you find one - get fixed or commented on very fast.

And the power of uncountable java-libraries out there is at your fingertips - so if you already have java-knowledge this knowledge isn't wasted. Rhino - the scripting-engine - even enables you to implement interfaces and extend classes. It is possible a little more advanced but i've done it and i know of packages taking advantage of such features (like ringo-ftpserver which is a wrapper around Apache FtpServer written in java)

Another pro for me is - because ringojs is based on java - it works fairly well with multithreading with ringo/worker for example.