 We'll be right back from the Node Summit. I'm Alex Williams, a Silicon Angle, where we are the leader in tech event coverage and here today with John Sheehan and I see a friend of ours off to the side, Stephen O'Grady. Can you come on and join us? So Stephen's gonna join us. Stephen is a well-known analyst in the community with Redbunk. They are famous for being extremely focused on developers. I don't know if you guys have met before. Hey John, nice to meet you. Yeah, likewise. So why don't we just talk about what you guys, some of the impressions that you get from this event. You guys both were on stage today, over the past two days. So John, why don't we start with you? What are some of your impressions of Node.js' maturity? What you're seeing of Node? What gets you excited about where this is going or maybe not? Okay, I think on the maturity level, I think we've reached the point where it's not only technically mature but also sort of the ecosystem is starting to mature around it in a way that it's no longer maybe a detriment or hard to find people to work on Node. So there's plenty of developers, there's plenty of service providers. There's a lot of other resources other than just a good solid technology that are really starting to take Node to the next level and help it thrive. And I think that's been the most impressive thing that I've seen is just all of the surrounding ecosystem type things. Stephen? Yeah, I mean, certainly I would agree. One of the interesting sort of phenomenon we observed over the last year, we started writing about Node, I wanna say in 2009, maybe 2010. So the sort of ascent has been sort of rapid in that timeframe, it's become very popular and I would certainly agree that it's hitting mainstream status. In the sense that we see real sort of big established businesses, like Microsoft is a platinum sponsor here. So that's sort of indicative of the traction that the platform has. But the interesting thing is that, certainly over the last year, as I said, one of the phenomenon that we've observed is Node sort of hitting that sort of quote unquote trough of disillusionment. In the sense that there were a couple articles that came out, one of them being sort of Node causes cancer and all these sorts of sort of negative backlash types of pieces. This process usually takes a lot longer. It usually takes multiple years to sort of come in and- To reach that trough? To reach it, but also to go through it. And this is the- I think you could sort of argue, to what extent they're through it or not. But certainly from our perspective, we haven't seen quite that same coverage. So I would make the argument that we may in fact have spit back out the other side. And have already sort of traversed that trough of disillusionment, which, if that ends up proving true, it has to be one of the sort of quickest times that's ever happened. Well I mean everything about Node is happening quicker than most other frameworks in history. The release has come faster, platform as a service has sprung up faster. I mean everything around it is probably moving faster than anything I think I've ever seen. So would you see that in your data that the ecosystem in general is growing as fast as Node? There's Node growing faster than the rest of the ecosystem? It is. So our internal metrics at Red Monkey, we measure sort of traction on our content. We look at a variety of different sources. You know GitHub, Stack Overflow, a variety of different developer communities. Node basically crushes, you know, really any of the other technologies that we cover. You know, and this is, you know, really I'd have to go back and actually look. But I think it's over an 18 month period. It's still occupying three of the top five spots, you know, in terms of our internal metrics. So it's always performed very well. The interesting thing is that it's not just Node, you know, and I mentioned this when I was on stage yesterday, that if you go and look at the number of modules that have been created and add-ins that have been created around the platform in a very short span of time, you know, community traction and support for the platform is really just remarkable. What are the other two? You said, you know, it's in the top five? Oh, three of the top five. Yeah, it's a good question. I honestly don't know. I'd have to go. I mean, and a lot of it depends on, are we looking at 18 months? Are we looking at a six month slice? Right. You know, because if I remember right, I think in 2010, at least one, if not two of the other two were associated with the Oracle and Google lawsuit around Java, you know, because that was very much top of mind for a lot of developers that we speak with and so on. But again, it just, it really looks at, it depends heavily on, you know, which precise timeframe we're taking a look at. Well, the world weaves in strange and mysterious ways, doesn't it? And Twilio has adopted Node.js. So we don't use it internally, but we have adopted it through your developer community. Right, right, through the ecosystem. Like we're trying to support it as well as anything else that we support. I mean, we love HTTP in all forms and, you know, Node is the current hotness when it comes to HTTP. So we want to make sure that we have all of the resources there that we can to provide Node developers the same class experience as everyone else. How do you see it as the current hotness? It's really sprung up in like our support requests or what we see at Hackathons with what people are building with. A lot of people will start new projects these days and use Node. It's as common as anything else. Our unofficial community contributed helper library has as many GitHub watchers as our Python library does. So the Python library has been around for a couple of years now and it's matured and the Node one has sprung up just about a year ago, I think. I mean, it's really just taken off. So like we see it in all sorts of different areas where we're starting to have to make sure that we have the knowledge on our end and make sure that we support the people that want to use it. I mean, it's interesting. I mean, you think about GitHub, right? And everything is just faster though to some extent, isn't it? Everything is just, you can just do things so much faster than you ever could before. And it seems like that Node.js has that combination effect where the skill sets, you still need good skill sets but there is a much lower barrier to entry. Isn't there, are you finding that? Very entry, I don't, I mean. I mean, it's JavaScript people who know how to draw a script and I think one of the interesting things to me about Node is the fact that there are a variety of sort of frameworks that are associated with languages. You know, we've all heard of things like Rails and Django and all these other language frameworks that are very popular, Spring for Java. The interesting thing to me about Node is that it is really fundamentally sort of a different approach. In terms of sort of pushing an asynchronous model, which is just a different way of doing things. So I think in terms of making it easy to use, one of the things that it attempts to solve and really for certain workloads, right? This isn't across the board but it attempts to sort of ease the pain of trying to sort of build applications at scale for data-driven workloads, you know, bit-driven workloads and so on, you know, but essentially trying to take problems of concurrency out of the equation. Well, the problems of concurrency seem to be one of the issues. I'm sorry? Concurrency, we were just talking with Theo of, oh, he has a big consulting firm who does the search conference. Yeah, yeah, yeah, Theo shots and I go, yeah. And he was talking about the issues with, that is one of the issues with Node.js is concurrency because you can't run into trouble a little bit. Yeah, I mean, it's just, as I said, it takes a different approach, right? I mean, it's single-threaded by nature. Right. In other words, that's the sort of model that it prescribes, that's the model that, I mean, basically it implements. It's part of the framework. So it's, you know, as I mentioned before, it's very appropriate for certain workloads, it's less appropriate for other workloads and it just depends on, all right, what are you trying to do? Because, yeah, I mean, I think for a certain class of workload, it makes, it definitely lowers the barrier to entry, makes things easier. Great. I mean, along those same lines, one of the things that Node really excels at is that you don't need to have some separate skill, some corresponding skill to go with it. Like, for instance, you want to get started in PHP, you have to configure Apache and get that set up. You can't just start with PHP and run it standalone. Yeah, in the next version, they're going to embed a web server. But the fact that Node is a web server or it can be a web server, sort of, they put an entire working example on their front page that you can copy and paste. You download it, you just do that and you're running. You don't need a separate configuration like that. I think that makes it really easy for people to tinker with and toy with. And we've found, especially with our API, which is also easy to tinker with and toy with, that that's really, really strong catalyst for people building bigger and better things that aren't tinkering toying. That the lower it is and the less ceremony there is to get started, the more likely people will build a lot of things that one of those ideas will take off and become something significant. And I think Node really hits on that really well. Well, we've all been to these startup contests. And you can get pretty cynical about them because the company is there to be pretty bad, right? But the companies here have actually been pretty impressive. I don't know what you guys think about it, but I've seen some companies up there that are doing some things that are actually really pretty cool. Yeah, I totally agree. Any favorites? I wouldn't necessarily say they're favorites. I think two of the ones that interest me specifically, actually I just saw our geek list and markover. And primarily because one of the things that being a developer focused firm, one of the things that we deal with, certainly analyze and comment on and so on is a difficulty for identifying resources. It's really difficult to hire. And hiring is, it doesn't matter how big your company is, how many people you have dedicated to it. It's a tremendously difficult process. So a lot of companies are turning to things like GitHub to try to do it more quantitatively because at the end of the day, a resume is not terribly useful for assessing programmer skill. So having these resources like a geek list or in this case a markover for the design side of the crowd, those are going to be interesting, I think, purely for, I mean, yes, they're useful to the people that use them, but from my perspective as an analyst, they're going to be just as useful for, all right, how do I sort of more quickly and efficiently identify resources that I might want to work with or hire? Markover was pretty impressive. I mean, we don't really seem many tools like that that are meant for the design community. And did you catch the bit, the note some of the people just tweeted this? That's a senior in college, that girl who presented. Yeah, I didn't know that. Yeah, she goes to Notre Dame or something. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's great. Good for her. Yeah, that's fantastic. I think Markover is sort of on the precipice of what seems to be a lot of people are working on is that the next generation of real-time collaboration, right? And she had the Skype window overlaid next to the annotation for the video in the audio chat, but it doesn't really make sense for that to be separate. That should be in every application. Every app should be empowered to build real-time communication into the apps, and that's what we're trying to tackle. And I mean, she really illustrated how powerful that was that we were going to collaborate, we were going to zoom in on these 10 pixels and talk about it over video, and we want to enable another generation of apps to do that, and I think we're really just on the front doorstep of things like Node and things like Twilio enabling those types of apps to be even more powerful. And it had kind of a sense of an activity stream integrated into it as well, which is just very easy to look at, very easy to be able to look at the designs themselves. Well, I think we're getting pretty close to our time here, so I want to thank you guys both for spending a few minutes just chatting about Node.js, and we'll talk to you guys soon. All right, thanks, Alex. Thanks. Thanks.