Nodejs vs Play for Front-End Apps

http://www.subbu.org/blog/2011/03/nodejs-vs-play-for-front-end-apps

We often see “hello world” style apps used for benchmarking servers. A “hello world” app can produce low-latency responses under several thousands of concurrent connections, but such tests do not help make choices for building real world apps. Here is a test I did at eBay recently comparing a front-end app built using two different stacks:

• nodejs (version 0.4.3) as the HTTP server, using Express (with NODE_ENV=production) as the web framework with EJS templates and cluster for launching node instances (cluster launches 8 instances of nodejs for the machine I used for testing)




• Play framework (version 1.1.1) as the web framework in production mode on Java 1.6.0_20.
  

The intent behind my choice of the Play framework is to pick up a stack that uses rails-style controller and view templates for front-end apps, but runs on the JVM. The Java-land is littered with a large number of complex legacy frameworks that don’t even get HTTP right, but I found Play easy to work with. I spent nearly equal amounts of time (under two hours) to build the same app on nodejs and Play.