Maybe Node isn't so bad

I know in previous posts I bashed Node.js a bit. I've done some thinking about it and I was struck by a revelation. If you write a Node app that serves to a browser you can use the same code on client & server. That means you can use frameworks like Backbone to manage your business logic on both on the server and on the client inside a browser.

The implications for this are huge. I've toyed with the idea of using Backbone + ASP.NET MVC together for a while now but I kept tripping up on all that code duplication between Backbone models and C# models. Node could be what launches the browser into a universal rich client host (and yes, HTML5 will help too).

The other crazy idea I had about using node is that this means less languages to learn. Imagine if you wrote JavaScript intensive apps with Node and backed it up with couchbase on the DB end. You would have JavaScript in your view, Javascript for business logic and JavaScript in the DB. The learning curve for a new developer to become productive would be the smallest learning curve that IT has seen in decades, probably for all time. This could change the landscape of IT forever. It wouldn't be such a bad idea to build a development team around that concept.