I'm a huge fan of Node.Js and the direction it is taking. It has become the middleware stack of choice for all my new applications. My new stack is:

Nginx / Redis / Node.Js / Riak

Node.Js has bindings for practically everything, is simple to get up and running, has a very light footprint and is fast (duh) among other things. Pairing javascript programming with data in json format has been a big win. Using Node.Js as a request broker with additional logic for application specifics is such a great way to program in this api centric environment the web and other services seem to be moving in.

> For example, the naming conventions for methods are camel-case instead of of the python standard “lowercase with underscores.”

This has to be a joke right? Style preferences gone wild!

Unfortunately not. Indeed the python standard library is inconsistent and has undescore and camel case and sometimes neither of these mixed. It's not only about style and readability but it's also usability. If you have a consistent style then you only have to remember the name of things (classes, methods, functions). If it's inconsistent then you have to memorize the style for each one as well, which I find pretty painful.

Nice interview. I like the idea of the web server being simplified down to a router to backend services. A non-blocking server is a natural for that task.

One of the other ideas the interview mentions, that I don't think is mentioned for the "cloud" enough, is the having data reside on the same machine (node :-)) as the software that analyzes it. If you're going to spread out over many machines why not stay local as much as possible. There is added overhead for administration but that can be automated.

>> There is much debate within SimpleGeo about whether cooperative multitasking or coroutines are a better style. The team that decided to go ahead with using Node.js likes the cooperative method as it makes debugging concurrency issues much easier to test.

very well said.

I see SimpleGeo has updated their homepage a little, looks good and more informative. I never managed to understand what they actually were selling before. "We're making it easier to build location - aware services" - was it ever that hard?