You did a great job of summarizing what's awesome about Node.js. My feeling is that Node.js is especially suited for applications where you'd like to maintain a persistent connection from the browser back to the server. Using a technique known as "long-polling", you can write an application that sends updates to the user in real time. Doing long polling on many of the web's giants, like Ruby on Rails or Django, would create immense load on the server, because each active client eats up one server process. This situation amounts to a tarpit attack. When you use something like Node.js, the server has no need of maintaining separate threads for each open connection.
This means you can create a browser-based chat application in Node.js that takes almost no system resources to serve a great many clients. Any time you want to do this sort of long-polling, Node.js is a great option.
It's worth mentioning that Ruby and Python both have tools to do this sort of thing (eventmachine and twisted, respectively), but that Node.js does it exceptionally well, and from the ground up. JavaScript is exceptionally well situated to a callback-based concurrency model, and it excels here. Also, being able to serialize and deserialize with JSON native to both the client and the server is pretty nifty.
I look forward to reading other answers here, this is a fantastic question.
It's worth pointing out that Node.js is also great for situations in which you'll be reusing a lot of code across the client/server gap. The Meteor framework makes this really easy, and a lot of folks are suggesting this might be the future of web development. I can say from experience that it's a whole lot of fun to write code in Meteor, and a big part of this is spending less time thinking about how you're going to restructure your data, so the code that runs in the browser can easily manipulate it and pass it back.
Here's an article on Pyramid and long-polling, which turns out to be very easy to set up with a little help from gevent: TicTacToe and Long Polling with Pyramid.
module.exports is the object that's actually returned as the result of a require call.
The exports variable is initially set to that same object (i.e. it's a shorthand "alias"), so in the module code you would usually write something like this:
let myFunc1 = function() { ... };
let myFunc2 = function() { ... };
exports.myFunc1 = myFunc1;
exports.myFunc2 = myFunc2;
to export (or "expose") the internally scoped functions myFunc1 and myFunc2.
And in the calling code you would use:
const m = require('./mymodule');
m.myFunc1();
where the last line shows how the result of require is (usually) just a plain object whose properties may be accessed.
NB: if you overwrite exports then it will no longer refer to module.exports. So if you wish to assign a new object (or a function reference) to exports then you should also assign that new object to module.exports
It's worth noting that the name added to the exports object does not have to be the same as the module's internally scoped name for the value that you're adding, so you could have:
let myVeryLongInternalName = function() { ... };
exports.shortName = myVeryLongInternalName;
// add other objects, functions, as required
followed by:
const m = require('./mymodule');
m.shortName(); // invokes module.myVeryLongInternalName
Best Solution
The app object is instantiated on creation of the Express server. It has a middleware stack that can be customized in
app.configure()(this is now deprecated in version 4.x).To setup your middleware, you can invoke
app.use(<specific_middleware_layer_here>)for every middleware layer that you want to add (it can be generic to all paths, or triggered only on specific path(s) your server handles), and it will add onto your Express middleware stack. Middleware layers can be added one by one in multiple invocations ofuse, or even all at once in series with one invocation. Seeusedocumentation for more details.To give an example for conceptual understanding of Express Middleware, here is what my app middleware stack (app.stack) looks like when logging my app object to the console as JSON:
As you might be able to deduce, I called
app.use(express.bodyParser()),app.use(express.cookieParser()), etc, which added these express middleware 'layers' to the middleware stack. Notice that the routes are blank, meaning that when I added those middleware layers I specified that they be triggered on any route. If I added a custom middleware layer that only triggered on the path/user/:idthat would be reflected as a string in theroutefield of that middleware layer object in the stack printout above.Each layer is essentially adding a function that specifically handles something to your flow through the middleware.
E.g. by adding
bodyParser, you're ensuring your server handles incoming requests through the express middleware. So, now parsing the body of incoming requests is part of the procedure that your middleware takes when handling incoming requests -- all because you calledapp.use(bodyParser).