> most popular are you talking about the top-10 websites? let's take them on...

yesbabyyes · on March 28, 2013

It might be a nitpick, but I wonder what you mean by this statement:

- QQ.com, Taobao.com, Baidu.com. Given that the Chinese do not pioneer web platforms, I don't see why they'd do this.

From what I've seen and heard, this isn't true. Taobao in particular seems to be running on a pretty cool stack, and has contributed a lot with OpenResty, which is nginx with modules, LuaJIT and some goodness, backed by Redis, Memcached, MySQL and/or Postgres (inside nginx' event model).

See http://openresty.org/

fourstar · on March 28, 2013

Top 10 is impossible to say since we don't know who will be in those slots 5 years from now. Internet time is insanely fast. Things come and go very quickly. I think it'd be fair to say half of the Top 1000 sites will be with the rate of Node's current development. Development is now getting to a point where they aren't going to be adding new features, but focusing on making it as efficient as possible in what it is (give this a listen http://javascriptjabber.com/052-jsj-node-npm-with-isaac-schl...). I made the switch recently from PHP and I don't think I'd ever go back. Love it, although yes there is a slight learning curve but if you know Javascript already you'll do fine. Knowing how to use callbacks and using some sort of middleware like express is the way to go when developing applications with it.

jrabone · on March 28, 2013

- Amazon.com. Don't know.

Very unlikely; Amazon's backend is basically Perl talking to an SoA via an internal service definition language. A change to server-side JS would require a re-write of almost everything (which isn't unprecedented; the migration from a single giant C++ binary to the Perl system 10-odd years ago was such a rewrite).

jsolson · on March 28, 2013

While I agree that it's terribly unlikely, one could argue that having the services backing the frontend fleet written in JavaScript was "powering" Amazon.com via JS. There's no technical limitation on what you can build those services in, so it's theoretically possible.

jrabone · on March 28, 2013

One could indeed, and again there is some precedent for writing services in "unusual" languages. However, the service ecosystem, tooling and deployment was/is entirely custom; they'd need to add support for JavaScript to an awful lot of internal tools to make it work well. The effort to get Java supported as a first-class development language was pretty substantial, and over the years there a number of internal teams with clever names sprung up to try and change the status quo in one way or another (SVN > Perforce! Ruby > Java!) with varying degrees of success.

So, yeah, no technical limitation, but explaining to Jeff that you've spent a year retooling the build system to support node.js but not actually shipped any features yet might lead to limitations of another sort :-)

jsolson · on March 28, 2013

> So, yeah, no technical limitation, but explaining to Jeff that you've spent a year retooling the build system to support node.js but not actually shipped any features yet might lead to limitations of another sort :-)

Indeed, and this is why I agree that it's pretty unlikely :).

During my stint at Amazon we barely had time to build the infrastructure we absolutely needed to launch features on the artificial deadlines imposed from somewhere in the stratosphere. How anyone had time to work on paying off technical debt or building new infrastructure is beyond me.