[nodejs] i heared a lot about nodejs but i am afraid

Node takes a bit of a learning curve but I personally think it is worth it.
When you start it will appear that you have to write a lot of code. But
when you learn what modules/extensions work for you it will get much
easier.

Of course there are certain types of apps where node should be used at any
cost. But for simple vanilla or MVC apps it is a matter of preference.

A few questions you might start out asking yourself:


1. How well do you know PHP/MySQL?
2. Have you built non-trivial apps with PHP, Ruby, etc. in the past?
3. Are you familiar with any PHP frameworks?
4. How comfortable are you with JavaScript?
5. Have you written any non-trivial apps with JavaScript? (i.e.
client-side, MVC, etc.)

@ Wil Moore i am well versed with traditional MVC apps in php .but from new
skill set point of view which has demand i was interested to do a
professional app in nodejs but the point is would i able to develop such
site in nodejs without facing any critical errors as i dont know inner
details of nodejs does nodejs supports all features like php/mysql like
for example

does it supports image thumbnail generation ?
does it support pdf,excel ,csv file handlings
does it supports encryption /decryption algos lie AES,Rjinidial or RSA.
etc.....
so main concern is does it have all the recipes required to develop a
traditional or complex apps as i don't want to stuck at any point.

i have a vps server with 256Ram is that enough for a site like ecommerce
site developed with nodejs.

nodejs is a JavaScript runtime. Yes, you can do all those things in JavaScript. Whether there are existing modules that do those specific tasks I don't know. You can search on npm and find out:

https://npmjs.org

If no modules exist for specific tasks you need, you'll have to write the code yourself.

I suppose that depends on how popular the site will be, how many concurrent requests it will need to process.

YES
NodejsGD - https://github.com/taggon/node-gd
and you can use ImageMagick as well - I prefer this, GD I use for
image creation like captcha
YES
on fast search about PDF - http://pdfkit.org/
EXCEL - its easy no matter of platform, i create EXCEL XML file and
its good to go
CSV - on fast search - https://github.com/koles/ya-csv - so it is supported
YES
check out - http://nodejs.org/api/crypto.html - module
it depends

I wouldn't go that far. It (NodeJS) will be fine for such a site...possibly
more ideal than the "traditional" tools.

i have to develop a product reviewing website i have option to choose

Given a choice, I wouldn't recommend that you go with PHP. This advice
isn't based off of the countless "PHP Hate" articles (BTW, most of those
articles are at least 90% accurate), but rather years of hands-on
experience with the language/platform.

develop such site in nodejs without facing any critical errors


JavaScript has a few well-known issues; but they are mostly minor. Many of
the issues people run into with JavaScript are in the category of "It
doesn't behave like C++/Java/PHP so it's wrong". When you have one of those
moments, just remember:
https://twitter.com/wilmoore/status/254686641795518465

as i dont know inner details of nodejs does nodejs supports all features

Your major issues with NodeJS won't be NodeJS itself, but JavaScript.
You'll want to put in the time to learn it well before doing anything too
serious otherwise you'll end up with extremely messy code.

If you are well versed in automated testing, this is the platform for you.
The NodeJS community tends to value automated testing at a much higher
level than the larger in-general JavaScript community.

You will want to check out Mocha (Test Framework) and Chai (Assertion
Library)

All of the above. When you are curious. visit npmjs.org and perform a
package search.

You will find an npm package for just about anything you need.

That won't get you too far with MySQL (or any relational database for that
matter), but it should be fine for development purposes.

I would do a small project in node.js, express before I commit to writing a
production quality app for someone.

There is a bit of a learning curve, but once you get over it, node is
really fun.

thanks all of you guys i am really excited to see quite good response from
nodejs community. actually my hosting provider has fixed 256MB RAM for
one application mysql will be handled by other ram. so what do you think
how much request nodejs can service in a month in this ram?
@WIL MILLER why dont you share your experience about how to actually do
async compact & maintainable code in js

That will be fine initially.

Quick tips:

1 - Learn how to create modules asap.
2 - Test drive your code.
3 - Read this: https://github.com/rwldrn/idiomatic.js.
4 - Learn about constructors, prototype chain, and prototypal inheritance.

That should get you going.

A few random thoughts...

Unless you have specific inter-operability requirements, or something else,
I would consider looking at different database solutions. Mongo melds
nicely to JavaScript - natively dealing with json data transport (bson
internally) and processing js functions internally. But there are also a
plethora of lucene based solutions. There are SQL modules for node, but
generally that isn't the best tool for the job.
Last time I looked there was no way of creating an xls file (I don't recall
xlsx but since a good portion of the world is office <2010 its moot for
me). You can make an rpc API or use a preexisting one (gearman comes to
mind) and use the excellent perl module for this (and I hear there's a Ruby
one as well).
There are no good classic MVC frameworks for node. You can define a single
view with express and jump into middleware to pump out json, XML, binary,
etc but you've got to try to keep things nice when you do this. There is
also railway and a nodejitsu framework that look like they might be awesome
in a year (but I'd dev with express at this point).
Node isn't as mature as PHP - its getting there quickly though. I never got
into rails much, but it seems that node is moving much faster than rails
ever did (in all aspects). Node development and adoption is surely moving
faster than PHP ever did. My only worry is that people will get too
comfortable with node and nosql DBs and forget basic security and make
vulnerable sites which might give node bad press (I hope medeor has had
improvements since I last looked - that scared me).
Don't write server side js like you write client side js. I use it because
it removes one language or DSL from my app. But I can tell whether I'm
looking at my server side code vs client side code from across the room
(not sure if this makes sense to anyone else or if I'm not doing things
correctly, but to me the code just looks different).
Since node is a standalone server, I think you'll notice a smaller
footprint (than mod_php in Apache) though I'd still run production behind
nginx (just because of mod_security, offloading static file server, and
load balancing).

Based on the above, are there a set of packages from NPM that "everyone"
should install (e.g., something for jquery) or whatever?

No:

1. Everybody's requirements are different. You might need an ORM to get a web site up quickly. I might need to avoid using higher-level abstractions to keep my code fast.
2. Node is a platform, not a framework. If you're not building your architecture up from node's standard library, you're not taking full advantage of one of node's greatest strengths, which is its minimalism.
3. There are already pretty broad divides between approaches for building full-stack apps in node. Some people get a lot of value out of Express and or Flatiron, smaller groups have strong preferences for other frameworks like Geddy, Tako, Restify or Strata (not exactly apples to apples comparison there, but you know what I mean, and that's also part of my point). I don't think it's good for us as a community to spend too much time trying to elect any of them as de facto standards.

FWIW, I've been working on a substantial Node project full-time for the last five months, and haven't written a line of browser or front-end code.

F

PS -- waqasde, PHP and Node.js are both good tools for building LAMP-style applications, but they do take very different approaches to solving the underlying problem. You'd probably want to take a look at Flatiron (with Plates and Stylus or less) or Express (with Jade and Stylus) along with node-mysql and Sequelize and see if the sample code for those tools looks like something you'd enjoy working with.