node.js

Ok, world, big fat disclaimer here: I'm not an experienced developer in all of the web frameworks that have existed in the history of ever (I've only done kinda serious stuff in three of 'em) and this thing I'm saying here is more of a hypothesis that I'm currently putting to experience's scrutiny than a rational, exhaustively thought, conclusion. Now, read on.

Nowadays, there are lots of web frameworks, and people have done wonderful stuff with them (twitter was written initially with ruby on rails, p.e.). And, truly, they have allowed the now commonplace fast, yet robust and standards compliant, development of big projects. But what about the little projects? Those little apps with at most a couple of tables in a database and a simple service to offer? Well, the really cool and experienced developers just do that in the big frameworks too...

Ay, there's the rub that makes big frameworks of so big a hype.

Let's go and rant a little somewhere.

So, I released to the wild today an experimental little site: catharted info . The rules there are simple: rant a little, read other rants, watch them disappear forever. The source is open and you're free to browse it in the github repository.

Yesterday, while being super-productive in my main project, I stumbled upon (pun intented) thingler and realie, both of which made me say "holy mackerel, this node.js hype looks extra rad!" So a fellow dev and I decided to start a little project to learn this awesome stuff. Maybe sometime in a future in a possible universe I'll post more about that.

Node.js has two major niceties: it brings javascript to the server side thus allowing developers to stop being bilingual -and thus never quite good in one language or the other- and focus on being extra proficient in one language for both server and client sides. And two, is totally asynchronous! non-blocking and truly multiple threaded.

CouchDB, is a schema-less, no-sql, waddayacallit database server: instead of being relational and having tables and structures and whatnot, it stores JSON strings representing objects. Thus, your javascript prowess can even be applied to the database! RAD.