I want major difference between ZeroMQ and socket.io
Performance. ( Is it faster? Scalable? )
Applications. ( Is it used for real time services? )
Browsers Support. ( Which browsers are supported? )
Although there are some situations where the two might be used interchangeably, you're comparing apples and oranges.
Socket.io
is a javascript library, composed of two parts- a client-side part meant to run in any browser that supports Web sockets, and a server-side part which runs on NodeJS. It's used to build real-time web applications, meaning you're expecting a lot of back and fourth communication between the client and server (and possibly multiple clients- eg. chat).
ZeroMQ
is a networking library, used to build distributed applications. It's meant to run on the backend. The idea is to enable communication between any combination of different threads or processes, be it on a single machine or a distributed network (which means it uses different transport means for different purposes- and it does so seamlessly). There are usage examples plenty of popular programming languages (PHP, Python, C++, C#, CL, Delphi, Erlang, F#, Felix, Haskell, Java, Objective-C, Ruby, Ada, Basic, Clojure, Go, Haxe, Node.js, ooc, Perl, and Scala), so it is not tied to NodeJS, or any server framework for that matter.
You should read the first couple of pages of the respective docs:
socket.io
ZeroMQ guide
In short:
ZeroMQ doesn't run inside a browser, and isn't necessarily tied to NodeJS or JavaScript- it facilitates communication between different "programs". Socket.io is written in JS, is a browser script and an npm package used when you want real time communication between NodeJS server and the client.
Related
After a couple hours of searching top lists of free "web servers" and "web frameworks" on google, I realized I'm not sure what I'm looking at.
Let's take a couple of example softwares I have come across :
IIS
Apache HTTP server
Apache Tomcat
Socket.io
Node.js
Django
Questions :
Do all these work on the same scope/do the same thing?
If not, what is absolutely necessary to have my "helloworld.html" acessible from anywhere with internet? Let's consider I already have a dedicated server and a domain
Also if not, how do these work together/compliment eachother?
Each of this software has a different description on their website for what it does, what it is, who should use it, it really gets confusing when you're trying to find what is "fresh", what the cool kids are using
IIS and Apache are web servers that support a variety of different technologies for plugging code into the web servers. So, if you were using one of these web servers, you would also use some other framework and language runtime to plug into them.
Apache Tomcat is a Java-based server framework for web applications. From the wikipedia page: "Apache Tomcat, often referred to as Tomcat, is an open-source Java Servlet Container developed by the Apache Software Foundation (ASF). Tomcat implements several Java EE specifications including Java Servlet, JavaServer Pages (JSP), Java EL, and WebSocket, and provides a "pure Java" HTTP web server environment in which Java code can run." It may be used independently of the Apache Web Server. The "Apache" in the name has to do with it being part of the Apache open-source organization. So, if you want to program your server in Java, this is one of your options.
node.js is a Javascript-based framework that is both a framework and it's own web server. So, if you want to program your web server in Javascript, this is your main option. There are additional frameworks you might use with node.js such as Express to make programming your web server simpler.
Django is a python-based framework. If you want to program your web server in Python, this is one of your choices.
socket.io is really not like any of the others. socket.io is a layer on top of webSockets that gives you a whole bunch of additional features over webSockets. This would run in whatever server-side language and framework you were already using and you would have to select a socket.io library that was compatible with your server technology. You can see a list of features that socket.io adds on top of a webSocket here: Moving from socket.io to raw websockets?. webSockets themselves are used for continuous communication between server and client (more efficient than repeated Ajax calls) and for push notification from server to client.
So, if you were looking to select a technology from scratch, there are a number of different ways you could start your selection process.
If you have a preferred language (Java, Python, Javascript, Ruby, C#, etc...) you either know already or want to learn, then you can look at the frameworks that support your language and start there. The framework will indicate whether you need a companion web server or whether than is already part of the framework.
If you have an existing hosting company that you want to use, you may need to understand which technologies they support so you don't select something that would require you to change hosting companies. Not all hosting companies support all technologies and some are better specialists in some technologies.
If you have specific 3rd party code or libraries you want to use, you may want to investigate which languages/frameworks it can more easily be used with.
What is fresh and what the cool kids are using changes pretty regularly. I would suggest that's a crummy criteria. What makes more sense is to understand which technologies and frameworks are doing well with accelerating growth and a rich development community behind them vs. which ones may be falling out of favor. I haven't myself done any sort of overall survey to offer any sort of list of what's on the upswing and doing well vs. what is more stagnant.
I'm personally partial to node.js and the huge NPM library of open-source and compatible code you can draw from and the ability to use one language for both front-end and back-end. It is certainly one of the choices that is growing rapidly and has a vibrant development community behind it. But, it is not the only choice that would meet those qualifications.
Can I use node.js server as a web server?
Such as I will run aspx sites or wcf service in node.js server instead
of IIS? Can I do it without IIS?
There are several alternatives to IIS for hosting ASP.NET applications such as:
IIS Express
Apache (Mono)
Cassini (not actively developped)
Kayak Project (not actively developped)
C# WebServer (not actively developped)
Abyss (not actively developped)
There are probably others, but generally most of them aren't actively developed.
Node.js is a little different. It is a platform built on Chrome's JavaScript runtime for easily building fast, scalable network applications. It fetures a event-driven, non-blocking I/O model that makes it lightweight and efficient, perfect for data-intensive real-time applications that run across distributed devices. It can still act as a web server and serve content. Node applications, to my knowledge, are written in JavaScript.
With this said:
Node.js can run on IIS, that's different from .NET running on Node.js
ASP.NET websites cannot run on Node.js
ASP.NET projects can benefit from using Node.js for some of its operations
ASP.NET has its own technology similar to Node.js and Socket.io called SignalR
TLDR - No, you can't.
These are different technologies, taken from Node.js website:
Node.js® is a platform built on Chrome's JavaScript runtime for easily
building fast, scalable network applications. Node.js uses an
event-driven, non-blocking I/O model that makes it lightweight and
efficient, perfect for data-intensive real-time applications that run
across distributed devices.
It is feasible to develop an aspnx interpreter in javascript, but makes absolutely no sense to implement one programming language in another programming language.
There must be a reason of this question asked, you could instead tell us why do you desire to have Nodejs to become an aspx server, there might be more elegant solution.
Our application will have a website and a mobile app both communicating to the same API backend. I have one Nodejs application for serving only APIs and a second Nodejs app serving html pages for the website. I am using Expressjs web framework for both of these apps.
What are different methods to call APIs in one Nodejs from another Nodejs app? Additional information on when to use each method would be great.
EDIT:
Example,
I have the following applications
NodejsAPI (node & express)
NodejsWebsite (node & express)
MobileApp
NodejsAPI will provide access to APIs for the MobileApp and the NodejsWebsite. MobileApp will access APIs over http. But I want to know what are the options for NodejsWebsite to call APIs in NodejsAPI app. From what I understand this will be inter process communication between the two processes. For .net applications such communications could be done using .net pipes, tcp communication etc. What are the equivalent methods for Nodejs applications on unix and linux platforms?
Thinking from IPC perspective I found the following to be useful,
What's the most efficient node.js inter-process communication library/method?
https://www.npmjs.org/package/node-ipc
There's node's vanilla http client, http client swiss army knife, request, then there's superagent, similar to jQuery.ajax. To make your life easier there's armrest and fementa, both different flavors of the same thing.
Now if you want to reach for more performance and have another interface of your application, you can use one of these RPC solutions:
dnode: One of the most popular solutions. It's makes things very easy. It's makes using remote interfaces seamless. phantomjs-node uses dnode. Doesn't perform well with huge objects compared to others. For small stuff, it's perfect. There's other ports for other languages too.
zerorpc: Uses zeromq as it's socket library which is famous for being reliable. It supports connecting to a python client too.
smith: RPC systems used in cloud9 editor backend. Basically almost as nice as dnode, but faster. Both smith and zerorpc uses msgpack instead of JSON, so they will save bytes on the wire.
axon-rpc: A lightweight solution. As nice to use as zerorpc. You can configure it to use msgpack with axon-msgpack.
All of above work on both TCP(To be used on different machines) or Unix Domain Sockets(faster than TCP, but only on the same machine).
If you want more performance, you can embed your NodejsAPI in your NodejsWebsite, by just simply requiring it's interface module.
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I'm feeling a bit confused, there are so many frameworks out there for Node.js related 'stuff'. Would someone be able to give me an overview of What are the differences between Backbone.js and Node.js? And which is best? Thanks in advance.
I am quoting it from a couple of sources here:
Firstly, to quote from the stack overflow question here:
Most of the things you listed are related only because they are
written in or otherwise use JavaScript. Comparing them is much like
comparing apples to oranges. It's like asking what the difference is
between a Toyota Camry and a V6 engine. They are related, but do
different things.
Node
Also known as Node.js, Node is the JavaScript environment on which we
run our server-side JavaScript code. It is based on the V8 JavaScript
engine. All of the JavaScript code you write, or install and run
from packages from NPM, GitHub, etc. is executed by the Node runtime
environment.
Backbone
Backbone can be likened to as a Model-View-Controller
framework for JavaScript. I believe it was originally written for the
browser; it helps keep your client-side JavaScript clean by
implementing most common MVC patterns (as well as a couple other
things), allowing you to more easily connect your client-side
JavaScript to your server-side code.
Also, this is from an answer for the same question on Quora. Credit goes to Drew Harry:
They're almost completely unrelated. Traditionally, Backbone.js is a
client library and Node.js is a way to write server-side applications
in Javascript. Backbone aims to be a model + view system for binding
data models with DOM elements that represent that model visually in a
web page. Backbone also provides Collections of Models, as well as a
bunch of utility functions for synchronizing those models with their
server-side representations.
Node.js is just the v8 Javascript run-time environment packaged with a
standard library to do useful server-side things with Javascript.
There are lots of packages designed for Node (check out npm for ways
to easily install those packages, Backbone included) that extend it to
do all sorts of interesting things. It's possible to use Backbone.js
with Node.js, but Backbone isn't particularly designed with use on the
server in mind.
Go and upvote the above answer(s) if you find the material helpful.
Pretty much the only things those two have in common is that they're Javascript based and have a lot of hype surrounding them (not undeserved though).
node.js is a framework for Javascript server applications. It includes the V8 Javascript engine developed for Chrome. It's asynchronous and event-driven, so it's ideal for serving large numbers of small requests.
backbone.js is a framework for client-side web applications, specifically for so-called "single page web applications" where only a single HTML page is sent to the browser at the beginning, and every interaction thereafter is handled by AJAX requests and Javascript logic that transforms the page.
This means that the two can also work effectively together: an app implemented using backbone.js for the frontend could have its AJAX requests handled by a server part using node.js - a rather popular combination since it allows you to have an entire web app using only Javascript.
Backbone.js is a javascript library, similar to jQuery or YUI but addressing different needs.
Node.js is a javascript interpreter, similar to Internet Explorer or Firefox or Safari but addressing different needs.
I don't know much about backbone.js but I believe you can use it with Node.js since it uses regular javascript. You may need a DOM emulation layer for the DOM related stuff though.
Additional answer:
A bit of googling reveals that there are people out there using Backbone on Node.js. The advantage of this is obviously you'll be able to use the same framework and reuse code on both client and server.
See: http://nerds.airbnb.com/weve-launched-our-first-nodejs-app-to-product
More additional answer:
With regards to semantics I see that some people disagree what some terms in computing means. While the terms are loosely used, and while they are somewhat interchangeable, they do have fairly well defined meanings.
In general, an interpreter is an executable, that is, a program that takes as input some data and executes it as a program. V8 is not this. It cannot take javascript by itself and run it. It needs to be compiled into another program, an interpreter in order to run javascript.
V8 does ship with example code to build an interpreter though. That interpreter shipped with V8 is called V8-shell.
An engine is a library that implements an interpreter. This is exactly what V8 is.
The two terms above are somewhat interchangeable because the word "interpreter" can also validly be used in place of "engine" to describe what a library implements. But that usage of the word is similar to the usage of "MVC framework" or "UI toolkit" in that it is used as an adjective. So it is correct to say that an "interpreter" is a kind of library.
But the word was originally used to mean the binary that executes a programming language. When used this way one uses it as a noun as it refers to something on the file system. Used this way is similar to the usage of the "compiler". For example one would call clang a compiler in this sense and one would call llvm, the library used by clang, a compiler in the previous sense.
Lets take a look at something that is not javascript as an example:
tcl is a programming language
tcl is also the library that implements the interpreter for tcl. In other words the engine.
tclsh is the tcl interpreter
Let's take a look at another example:
ruby is a programming language
RubyC is one of the many engines for ruby
ruby is the interpreter that uses RubyC
Nobody uses the word "framework" when referring to the binary executable interpreter for the above two languages. It just sounds silly.
But wait you say, Node.js refers to more than just node.exe. It truly provides a bunch of additional features that can be used as a good foundation to write great programs. In other words a framework.
Well, yes. That being true does not make the usage of the word "interpreter" to refer to node.exe automatically invalid. Just as using the word "earth" to refer to the planet does not make using the word to refer to soil automatically invalid.
Besides, those extra functionality? That's true for tcl and ruby as well. It's also true for C. Those extra functionality like fs and http on Node.js are traditionally called standard library. While the Node.js project calls it a framework that's their choice. Almost nobody else calls their interpreter + standard library a framework. PHP for example is distributed exactly like Node.js with a bunch of very high level standard libraries but nobody would call PHP a framework. It's also a bit silly when people write actual frameworks on top of node - frameworks for a framework. But I'm not going to say they are wrong because they choose to call it that. It's just their way to describe what they've created. More power to them.
What I am saying is that people who say that node.js is not an interpreter is ignoring the usage of the word throughout the history of computing. I don't know. Coming from an asian background it's natural to me to assume that everything belongs to multiple categories. Maybe it's a western idea that things belong strictly to specific categories that I don't quite get.
So here are the facts:
Node.js is not simply a javascript library. You need node.exe to use the standard libraries that node ships with.
Backbone.js is on the other hand a standard javascript library. It is not an executable.
Node.js is the only example where an interpreter + library is called a framework so far. All other examples of framework I know of in programming refer to libraries that implement a design pattern.
Calling something "B" does not automatically make calling it "A" invalid.
One final thing: web browsers also come with a very large high level standard library for javascript. It's called the DOM (there's also a bunch of other stuff like Math and XMLHttpRequest but the DOM is the biggest). Accordingly one should call Internet Explorer and Firefox javascript frameworks but nobody does that.
Node.js :
Javascript for backend side. ( like : php, ruby on rails, python, etc. )
Backbone.js :
Javascript for frontend side ( running on the browser of your client )
backbone.js also uses jquery , more frameworks of javascript for client side are :
1. mootools
2. ExtJS
3. dojo
4. prototype
and many more ...
Both are javascript related but totally different.
Node is a interpreter/platform to execute javascript code in the server such as JDK or Ruby. To put it simple, you need NodeJS installed to interpret Backbone based script on the server.
When it comes to server side MVC., Geddy, RailwayJS, Express etc., considered to be serving the purpose better than Backbone.
Whereas Backbone is a champion MVC framework in the client side.
Node.js is a server-side platform designated for building network applications. It is built on Google's V8 Javascript Engine and uses asynchronous event-driven approach for building applications. Backbone.js is a simply javascript client library that makes it easier to create and maintain client-side code and comply with MVC pattern. Hence, they cannot be compared.
Backbone.js has a lot of alternatives that use slightly different approach to achieve the same goal. Most known are: knockout, ember.js and others. And it also can be plugged into node.js application.
In every blog, on every site, on every forum, all you hear about Node is how people use it for web development, similar to Ruby on Rails. And at the same time you always hear the slogan "for easily building fast, scalable network applications". My simple question is, can it be used for other server applications as well? Or rather, should it? There is the TCP server example of course, but is Node good/fast enough for other things than a web server? Like... a server for an online game? This is just a question out of curiosity, since it looks like it shouldn't be too much of a problem.
Node.JS at it's core is a high-performance i/o library/framework. So you can basically build ANY application that relies on fast i/o operations (which of course includes a web-server).
Since it's not a scripting language like PHP, you do not rely on a seperate server application to host your code; it's self-hosted.
So to answer your question: yes, you can build ANY server application using node.js (be it a server for an online game, an e-mail server or even a high-speed feed parser for machine-generated data).