Developers have often called MongoDB and Node.js a “match made in heaven,”. Node.js’s powerful event-based concurrency framework matches well to MongoDB’s real-time capabilities, and has made it simple to run new projects with end-to-end JavaScript. Over the past few weeks, there’s been a lot of activity in the MongoDB and Node.js communities.
Industry Validation
- The MongoDB and Node stack entered the enterprise: eBay’s engineering team announced their first Node.js project, called “Talk”, powered by MongoDB. This particular project had to be “as real-time as possible,” and handle heavy I/O operations, pushing eBay to switch from their typical Java workflow to Node.js.
- 10gen, Joyent, Clock and Nodejitsu all gave an update on the state of the Nodestack on May 21.
- Strongloop, a startup that employs some of Node.js’s core contributors, just launched their first enterprise distribution of Node.js. This is appealing to growing enterprise need for an out-of-the-box distribution with pre-installed modules and advanced features like private NPM repos.
Community Enthusiasm
On a period of 2 weeks, MongoDB User Groups in New York City, Atlanta, San Francisco, Silicon Valley and Boston hosted presentations on Node.js. The New York City MongoDB User Group hosted a talk on the “MEAN” stack (MongoDB, ExpressJS, AngularJS and Node.js), and Val Karpov started with an overview of why MongoDB and Node.js are winning in the developer community.
- MongoDB’s flexible data model makes it simpler to write applications, leaving minimal mental translation from tables to objects. With dynamic schemas, there is no need to keep data consistent with schemas, as is the case with RDBMS. Thinking about objects instead of tables eases development for the long term.
- Thousands of APIs are readily available and with Node.js you can perform a lot of I/O requests and start many connections at the same time without having a large memory overhead. It’s all done in one single-threaded event loop.
- If you’re handling most of your data on the front end in JSON, writing a query in SQL isn’t so valuable. With MongoDB and Node.js, you can handle JSON on both the front-end and at the server level.
Javascript Everywhere
The Node.js and MongoDB stack is more than just hype: the stack is meeting requirements for real-time applications in the enterprise and drumming up global community adoption. PaaS providers such as MongoLab, Windows Azure and Nodejitsu among others are betting big on wide Node.js adoption, and gaining traction. We expect to see more JavaScript everywhere.