Question

I want to implement a Web Service whose purpose is to execute batch programs stored in a database. The “command line parameters” will be sent to my Web Service as JSON-serialized objects.

Since this is, for the time being, just a personal project, my main concerns are elegance and maintainability, and thus node.js seems like a natural choice. (I know Apache and IIS are mature, proven technologies, but I find them too convoluted and not transparent enough, respectively.)

However, from what I have read, even though node.js can delegate non-sequential tasks to separate concurrent processes, node.js cannot handle these non-sequential tasks concurrently by itself. This poses me the following dilemma:

1. If I create a separate command line utility to be called from node.js, leaving the Web Service as a mere API for the command line utility, I would have to pass huge command line parameters (the serialized JSON objects) from node.js to the command line utility, and would also have to either implement a JSON parser myself or worry about incorporating someone else’s JSON parser in my program.

2. If I handle everything within node.js, I lose concurrent request processing as a feature. Unless there is a way to do true concurrency in node.js, of course.

Neither of these options is palatable enough for my taste. So my question is the following: Is there any way to write truly concurrent programs for node.js, so as to avoid this dilemma?

Answer 1

You can use worker processes, there are modules for that. Also, node v0.8 will have isolated multithreading.