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Disclaimer: There was this previous question. Since it was asked a few months back before the new Node.js was released - I'm asking it again.

I heard that Microsoft has joined hands with the Node.js guys and they're actively working together. I have also created a sample script in Node.js for my upcoming app, which works great on my Windows.

Now I have two questions:

  1. Will Node.js scripts work fine on all Windows platforms? My app will be downloaded by many users on their Windows box. Am I right in choosing such a new technology like node.js for production use?

  2. Is there any way to prevent users from accessing the raw JS code?

Community
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user1072516
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2 Answers2

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Node.js heavily relies on async dispatching of (filesystem) events. Because there is an obvious difference between the architecture in Unix-based OS's (Linux / OSX / etc.) and Windows, up to node.js 0.4.x the Windows version used emulation methods to emulate the event mechanism that was used by Unix. The real power of node.js got lost on this, because scaling performance was way worse than on Unix based systems.

As of node.js 0.6.x (0.5.x was the unstable branch) the Windows branch of node.js uses the native IOCP, which offers similar performance. Furthermore Microsoft has adopted node.js as a native module for IIS with iisnode as of version 0.6.x. Gives me a pretty solid feeling on node.js for Windows but I don't know of any major product that runs it at this point.

Jan Jongboom
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I'm running a couple of my Node.js sites on Windows servers today, using iisnode. I prefer that setup to the Ubuntu hosting I had them on previously.

As long as you don't need compiled modules (jsdom's dependency on contextify comes to mind), Node.exe works well. One of the sites I moved over to iisnode and Node.exe was a full Express-based site with lots of opportunity for cross-platform breakage, but it worked identically with only a couple lines modified to work with iisnode.

My opinion is that yes, Node 0.6.x is as ready for production on Windows as it is on Linux and OS X.

Dave Ward
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  • You probably meant Node 0.6.x is ready no? 0.5.x is considered unstable. – alessioalex Nov 30 '11 at 11:19
  • @alessioalex: I was actually hosting those two sites under 0.5.x without any issues at all. You're right that it would be better to say 0.6.x though. – Dave Ward Nov 30 '11 at 14:47