Nodejs asset management

Question

Evaluating Nodejs and trying to see if it will fit our needs. Coming from a rails world, I have a few unanswered questions despite searching for a long time.

1. Whats the best way to manage assets with Nodejs (Expressjs)? In rails, the static assets are a) fingerprinted for caching forever b) js and css are minified 3) scss is compiled down to css

2. Whats the best way to handled uploaded images from users such as avatars?

3. Does grunt help with minifying and gzipping html/css/javascript?

4. How can I avoid mutliple http requests to the server with Node. I don't want to make multiple http requests for every javascript asset I need. Rails helps here by combining all js and css files.

5. Also, is Mongodb the preferred solution for most projects? I hear a lot of bad things about Mongodb and good things about it. Having a difficult time deciding if Mongo can help with more reads than writes with probably 400-500 GB data in the long run.

Any help or pointers? Thanks so much for taking the time to point me to the right places.

Answer 1

For each of the point you mentioned I give you a few module examples that might fit your need. Remember that at every point there are much more modules serving the same purpose:

1. node-static (as a static file server), node-uglify (for minifying JS code), css-clean (same for CSS), merge-js, sqwish, and jake can help you with the building of the website (in this step you could plug-in the previous modules)

2. node-formidable is pretty famous

3. check out this question

4. checkout this question

5. I am not sure if it is the "preferred". It is the noSQL and the Javascript nature in it that makes it attractive. There are modules already for every type of database. ongo should handle that data. Depends also how large is one document. There are some limitations.

There is this Github Wiki page in the NodeJS project listing and categorizing many of the important modules out there.

The exact choice of modules also depends what framework will you use use to build the app. A pretty established (but certainly not the only one) is express. But you can find more on this topic here.