Has NodeJS finally come into its own?

If you couldn’t tell by the two posts in one day, I’m pretty excited about Ghost. My previous post detailed Ghost’s feature set, but this post is more in regards to the back-end tech powering the spooky blog software. As much of a node fanboy I am, I have been reluctant to go “all in” with developing on the platform. While I’m relatively new to the development side of things, I’ve been creating websites since my parents first got a 56k modem. I remember the introduction of CGI (and the cgi-bin), PHP, ASP, etc. And I watched as PHP became a household name. PHP’s proliferation was twofold: the ease of the language made it simple to inject into an HTML site, but also the fact that WordPress, which powered 14.7% of all websites in the world in 2011, was written in PHP did much to make the language a mainstay. Because of this market saturation, support for PHP is fantastic. Of course you can install it on a VPS or personal server, but you’ll also find it available on shared hosting solutions à la Dreamhost and the like. This kind of support pretty much guarantees PHP won’t be going anywhere for the foreseeable future. I got a bit off-topic there, but I promise you there’s a point. I look at PHP’s market saturation, and can’t help but see the two factors that led to its dominance reflected in nodeJS:

1.An ease of injecting the language into client-side sites (it’s JavaScript! We already know how to write this!). 2. A solid bit of blog / CMS software that will allow for easy setup of new sites powered by Node.

I’m hoping that Ghost will do for Node what WordPress did for PHP. Judging by the Kickstarter numbers, it looks like there’s a few people that feel similarly; Ghost reached its goal just 24 hours after being posted up. And I believe that Ghost’s promise to provide a hosting solution for its more technically illiterate users is a solid step in getting its name out to the masses.