Node express now

Question

I want to rewrite a complete community website in nodejs,express and nowjs with mongodb. Its currently in php using the codeigniter framework. It includes functionality such as your own profile page, photoalbum, guestbook, internal messages, contacts and more. And im going to add an im to it and some other things like a forum and so on. Its a pretty big project.

I have to make a decision about which techniques to use in the webapplication. So i did a little research and found, node, Expess and nowjs. Should i stick to finish the application in php( codeigniter ), mysql and ajax, or can i do this in express, mongodb and nowjs?

Can anyone recommend this for use on a live production site? And if so, are there any security issues one should know about? General guidelines?

Help would be really appreciated so i can make up my mind and finish the project

Regards

George

Answer 1

The problem with Nodejs being young is not that it's a half baked product or something but infact it's growing very fast and new developments are being done at breath taking place. So you need to keep up with them while developing.

Otherwise there are huge projects out there developed totally with node and express. Take a look at expressjs.com/applications to see what kind of commericial projects are built using it.

As far as security, sessions etc. are concerned. Unlike ASP/PHP , you don't get most of the features out of the box. You'll need to either write them yourselves or using open source frameworks. Both ways you and only you have to ensure that your application has all bases covered. With flexibility, comes complexity.

It should be noted that Nodejs is optimum for real time I/O. If you think this is something which is required at your end then I highly recommend to go for it.

Answer 2

What you describe does sound like a big project.

If you have the time to spare, I would suggest picking a small portion of it that deals with managing secure sessions (e.g. the profile page). Implement that in Express to get a sense of how it compares to the existing PHP. If you like it, keep going.

Particularly when security is at stake, always try to use existing components when they are available. Node's minimalism makes it tempting to 'roll your own,' but it's very easy to make a security mistake with anything less than expert knowledge.