John Sheehan of Twilo and Steven O’Grady of Red Monk sat down with ServicesANGLE editor Alex Williams to discuss Node.js, the buzzed-about programming language that landed its own convention late last month.

In response to a question from Williams, Sheehan said that he believes Node.js is technically mature, but that the ecosystem still has some ripening ahead of it. O’Grady agreed, and added that a growing amount of adoption from enterprises (he pointed at Microsoft as a specific example, which was one of the sponsors of the Node Summit even) is driving Node.js closer towards hitting mainstream status. He expanded on this point by noting that the young ecosystem is growing at a remarkably fast pace compared with other technologies – and this time it was Sheehan’s turn to agree.

Sheehan referred to the lanaguge as the “current hotness,” and based it on his own firm’s experience with its developer community. He told Alex that Twilo has been seeing more support requests for Node, as well as an increase in the amount of apps written in it and more growth happening around it overall.

The second half of the interview focused more on Node.js’s unique values that managed to carry it to its current position. According to O’Grady the valuein Node expresses itself in a number of ways,  first and foremost that the language was developed specifically with large-scale, data driven workloads in mind. It may not excel in handling other types of processes but, considering all the greatly justified fuss around big data and analytics, that’s not a shortcoming that is likely to hinder Node’s pace.

Seehan added that there’s a different approach involved as well, which also counts as a big plus. Developers can develop run both backend and frontend with Node, unlike with other languages.


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