Question

I’m new to node and reading some books about it. Now I think it’s time to do some dev stuff with it. I’m planning to implement a little project which I want to deploy in the cloud (AWS, Heroku, …).

What I still haven’t figured out are following points (I have a MacBook Pro with OS X 10.7):

• which dev environment should I use? I thought about Aptana Studio (no node support as far as I’ve seen) and transferring the files via ssh to a local VirtualBox CentOS 6.3 machine which has node.js and some modules installed on it
• is there any good deployment strategy for hosting my app in the cloud? For example, if I’m developing with Aptana Studio, I don’t think there is a plugin which let’s you deploy your code on some virtual server in the AWS or Heroku cloud, isn’t it?

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

• You can and should develop and run your application locally on your mac. Dealing with 2 machines, 2 OSes, and constant file transfers is a nuisance in development and offers no benefit. It also cripples nice things like fsevents for watching files and good text editor integration.
• If you are into the whole IDE thing, perhaps consider https://c9.io/
• There are several cloud Platform as a Service companies you could consider
  • http://nodejitsu.com/
  • https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/nodejs
  • https://www.dotcloud.com/
  • http://www.cloudfoundry.com/
  • http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/develop/nodejs/tutorials/getting-started/
• Here’s some blog posts reviewing some of these PaaS offerings
  • http://mrdanadams.com/2012/node-js-paas-hosting-services/
  • http://ocdevel.com/blog/nodejs-paas-comparison
• In terms of deployment, most of these PaaS companies are going to integrate with npm and github, so deployment is going to take no more than a handful of commands at most.