Non-blocking async I/O frameworks are the new hotness, I’ve already said it. But aside the buzzwords, what can we do with these frameworks? Here’s a few examples using Node.js.

Track users with Redis

Rick Olson has developed a library to track what users are on which pages using Redis to store the data.

Now you can track users in real-time! It’s a neat feature to know who is editing a wiki page at the same time as you but real-time generates a lot of requests. If your server blocks the process for each request your server is gonna be stuck quickly.

Thanks to Node.js and the async Redis client your server will be in better shape.

Streaming

Remember my article about Twitter Stream with Websockets? There’s the same here but with Node.js. As you can see the RabbitMQ part is not present because it is not really necessary with a non-blocking framework. But having a queue is recommended at some point (generally when you use more than one process).

Streaming with a classic web framework is hard to code (= to avoid blocking the process). With Node.js you almost don’t realize that you stream data!

Here’s some useful code about streaming with Node.js:

• In addition to the tracker with Redis, Rick Olson has also developed a Twitter Stream library for Node.js.
• You can stream file uploads.
• In fact New Bamboo has a long article about different streaming techniques with Node.js.
• If you want to use Comet with less than 10 lines of code, Faye is for you.

There’s more

Don’t forget to check out the Node.js wiki to have a longer list of applications.