Are large-scale Node.js systems possible with mainstream developers? If you believe that these large-scale Node.js systems will resemble the large-scale Java and .Net systems you have known and loved, then the answer is, emphatically, no. JavaScript is far too weak a language to support the complexity inherent in systems of such scale. It’s not exactly type-safe, and half the language is unusable. There’s a reason the best-selling book on the language is called JavaScript, The Good Parts.
Despite this, we’ve managed to build quite a few large-scale systems at my company, nearForm. Here’s what we’ve learned, and how we do it.
The defining attribute of most large-scale, mainstream traditional systems is that they are monolithic. That is, a single large codebase, with many files, thousands of classes, and innumerable configuration files (in XML, if you’re lucky). Trying to build a system like this in JavaScript is indeed the path to madness. The visceral rejection of Node.js that you see from some quarters is often the spidey-sense of an experienced enterprise developer zapping them between the eyes. JavaScript? No! This reaction is entirely justified. Java and .Net have been designed to survive enterprise development. They enable monolithic architecture.
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