Node.js and the JavaScript Age
"The JavaScript age is about event streams. Modern web pages are not pages, they are event-driven applications through which information moves. The core content vessel of the web — the document object model — still exists, but not as HTML markup. The DOM is an in-memory, efficiently-encoded data structure generated by JavaScript.
LAMP architectures are dead because few web applications want to ship full payloads of markup to the client in response to a small event; they want to update just a fragment of the DOM, using JavaScript. AJAX achieved this, but when your server-side LAMP templates are 10% HTML and 90% JavaScript, it’s clear that you’re doing it wrong."
"With regard to responding to event streams, node.js is ideal. Its asynchronous, non-blocking architecture means it’s incredibly fast. It uses HTTP 1.1, keeps its connections open, and a single server can handle thousands of open connections at once."
LAMP architectures are dead because few web applications want to ship full payloads of markup to the client in response to a small event; they want to update just a fragment of the DOM, using JavaScript. AJAX achieved this, but when your server-side LAMP templates are 10% HTML and 90% JavaScript, it’s clear that you’re doing it wrong."
"With regard to responding to event streams, node.js is ideal. Its asynchronous, non-blocking architecture means it’s incredibly fast. It uses HTTP 1.1, keeps its connections open, and a single server can handle thousands of open connections at once."
"Finally, it’s worth considering that events are simply packets of data, and the emerging lingua franca of data on the web is JSON. This is what client-side applications receive when a ticker moves, or a message arrives. This is, again, a native format for node.js.
