I could write a similar post, having used Node on a couple of projects before nodding to reality and switching back to Rails for a larger project.
For a "typical" web project, Rails simply has a ton of mature libraries that don't exist in Node, or are very early days. Sure, there might be a basic data mapper, but does it have support for testing? Automatic counter caching? Workaround on StackOverflow for a hundred things the framework doesn't cover by default?
Rails versus NodeJS isn't apples-to-oranges. Rails is an opinionated framework for web development, Node is a low-level evented framework. This is important because right now, Node has no Rails equivalent. It has Express as the equivalent of Ruby's Sinatra, but for a higher-level web framework, there are several possibilities and none of them the outright leader. This is the situation Python found itself in circa 2006, before Django became the de facto standard for web apps, and (speaking as a mostly-outsider) its seems to me the Python community is better for it. I truly hope a high-level framework establishes itself as the clear standard for Node development, presumably one which embraces the benefits of dual-side JavaScript.
The problem is that Rails has been around since what 2005. Node has been around for a much shorter period and has only stabilized over the past year. So they just arent comparible in that sense. Plus node works differently then Rails and i admit it takes time to get used to that.
If you do take the time to learn node though all i can say is its just AWESOME! So lets see how things are when node is 5 years old or so.
Definitely, Node still has a lot of promise. It's not a competition. Well, it is to some, but I don't care about that. I just care about what do I use to ship something useful today.
That's part of the problem in a way. Rails-style large applications are kinda poor by-design. Even Express suffers from this more than I'd like (express-specific plugins etc). Ideally Express "plugins" or extensions would just be thin wrappers around things that the rest of the Node community can utilize. I'm guilty of this too of course but that's largely due to time constraints.
Anyway, writing Rails for Node won't be anything revolutionary, it would just be... Rails on a different platform. Frankly lots of developers including myself prefer these smaller frameworks, sure some things might be a bit slower to get started with but ultimately you're not fighting a framework, it's just another block of lego.
I used Drupal for about 3 or 4 years, and you can get things going much faster than Rails even, but you'll spend a lot of time fighting the thing.
I hope so, but with the caveat that it's easy to start a project like this and a lot harder to see it through. Various Node projects have shown promise, but haven't gone the distance. If one really gains traction, that's great for Node overall.
For a "typical" web project, Rails simply has a ton of mature libraries that don't exist in Node, or are very early days. Sure, there might be a basic data mapper, but does it have support for testing? Automatic counter caching? Workaround on StackOverflow for a hundred things the framework doesn't cover by default?
Rails versus NodeJS isn't apples-to-oranges. Rails is an opinionated framework for web development, Node is a low-level evented framework. This is important because right now, Node has no Rails equivalent. It has Express as the equivalent of Ruby's Sinatra, but for a higher-level web framework, there are several possibilities and none of them the outright leader. This is the situation Python found itself in circa 2006, before Django became the de facto standard for web apps, and (speaking as a mostly-outsider) its seems to me the Python community is better for it. I truly hope a high-level framework establishes itself as the clear standard for Node development, presumably one which embraces the benefits of dual-side JavaScript.