A new direction for web applications

Interesting thoughts about the evolution of the web and the problems that people are solving. However, designing applications that require state to be maintained in a single process can come back to bite you in the ass when a single process can no longer keep up / falls over. Most people don't hit that ceiling, but then again most people's systems are "just fine" with having a thread blocked on their I/O.<p>I like node.js because it is much faster than ruby and it provides a very thin layer of abstraction that takes most of the pain out of dealing with async io. I also happen to like JavaScript as a language. Further, I enjoy developing in primarily one language as it reduces the cognitive burden of context shift between front and back-end development. Finally, I enjoy the node.js debugging tools more than anything ruby has to offer (thanks Danny Coates and the chrome dev tools team!)<p>However, telling people that you cannot connect to multiple databases with ruby or python and saying that node is unique in its ability to build systems that maintain state within a process isn't intellectually honest; node.js doesn't have a particular advantage over netty, eventmachine or twisted for the particular use-cases that you gave; there are already non-blocking variants of most of the libraries available to the node.js community in python, ruby and (increasingly) java.

While I appreciate the fact that many "traditional" MVC frameworks fall down when it comes to threading, events, long running connections, event handling, actor-based concurrency, asynchronous processing, and multiple data / presentation resources ... I don't think MVC is the root of the problem.<p>In fact, MVC doesn't really have anything to do with those issues: it is a pattern addressing the separation of concerns, whereas the shortcomings in the article relate to specific implementation of frameworks that also happen to follow the MVC pattern.<p>That said, there certainly is a new direction emerging for web applications: we're entering the world of sophisticated software. :)

The author gives an analogy which implies that node.js makes Rails irrelevant for a certain kind of apps, but I'm not convinced by the examples given.<p>In addition, if you're making a single process talk to a PostgreSQL, Redis and CouchDB database, send email and SMS, and talk to a couple of APIs then you're doing it wrong.<p>I'd like someone to show me the code and a real example.