SQL is good, at least good enough for many cases where performance and scalability do not matter much. It has nearly all the things we need, although this is also why it cannot fulfill many developers’ requirements when it comes to actual deployment. Nowadays especially, applications are getting more and more data(big data trend) and should scale horizontally for more and easier access from around the world. Therefore, more and more people came to believe that it has become the elephant in the room and want to get rid of its disadvantages.

Personally I love Postgres and I think many other people share this passion. It is reliable and reasonably fast and it recently gets new feature for document storing mechanism. So I will choose PSQL whenever possible. When it comes to spacial data, however, we will need an extension called PostGIS.

What is Yelp? Well, to me is just TripAdviser just with better APIs, although the official introduction goes like this:

As a university student, learning is something that I should never lack of–otherwise my college life is just not achieving its desired purpose. However, sadly, today after going through a lecture in HR2002, I started to question how deep and meaningful my past learning in NUS, in early was.

Okay. Last tutorial in this series actually was about express.js. Express is a good framework in Node environment to get started with web programming but when compared to MVC frameworks in Python(Django), Ruby(Rails), Scala(Play), it is smaller and does not aim to come with everything pre-packaged. In fact, since express@4.x, the developers are rewriting the framework to be more independent of all middlewares. Some essential packages(body-parser, cookie-parser, jade, morgan, serve-favicon and etc.) are still around but most are stripped out the default installation. Most applications do require a backend database to support for usability and that is why we are looking at MongoDB now.

Recently I am developing a Node.js app with my friends. Since we are just developing this as a side project now, we do not have a plan yet to purchase a server or pay for a cloud one yet. So we are searching for any free hosting services for Node.js. Turns out many servers do support hosting of Node.js with no charge for small apps but adding mongoDB as database will incur charges(e.g. Heroku–although this one does not cost you anything, some people like me are just not comfortable with providing credit card information), or others may require a credit card. Anyway we found a totally free one–OpenShift and pushed the source code to remote server, and boom nothing worked.

Node is relatively new compared to Python(Django) and Ruby(Rails) but it getting a lot of popularity because of its simplicity and performance plus. Although there is some increasing concern with the stability of Node and maintainability of Node projects…, Node community is indeed thriving and improving Node very fast. Because of Node’s simplicity and recent popularity, I decide to give it a try in a Hackathon.