Node.js Momentum Grows, DevOps Survey Finds
(Vintage Tone/Shutterstock)
Enterprise software developers are frequently on the lookout for tools that can streamline existing business processes or help create new ones. Increasingly, a survey funds, many are turning to open source tools or spin-off distributions, leading some to start their own companies.
Among the most popular open source tools, according to a vendor survey released this week by San Francisco-based NodeSource, is the JavaScript runtime Node.js. The technology has been gaining momentum with software developers since going mainstream earlier in the decade.
The NodeSource survey appears to confirm that momentum, revealing that 89 percent of respondents said they are boosting hiring based on the number of Node.js projects. Development projects based on Docker application containers were a distant second (62 percent) followed by NPM software (28 percent), which is used to manage JavaScript tools.
Other open-source tools cited by developers included Apache Spark and Git (both 26 percent), MongoDB (23 percent) and MySQL (15 percent).
Given the growing momentum of Node.js and other development tools, no less than 91 percent of respondents told the vendor they expect these open source projects to spawn new companies. Seventy-four percent believed these startups would be based on Node.js while 51 percent cited Docker containers.
Indeed, San Francisco-based Docker has been expanding its application container ecosystem by releasing it underlying runtime to the open source community. It has also introduced a batch of container services aimed enterprise developers and IT operator seeking to push applications into production and scale them across hybrid cloud infrastructure.
Meanwhile, 22 percent of developers surveyed by NoteSource cited the MongoDB NoSQL database as a likely generator of software startups.
More than a quarter of those surveyed (28 percent) went so far as to predict a surge in IPOs by open source software companies over the next year. They cited IPOs earlier this year by API specialist Mulesoft Inc. (NYSE: MULE), data prep vendor Alteryx Inc. (NYSE: AYX) along with Hadoop software provider Cloudera Inc. (NYSE: CLDR) and, most recently, enterprise software developer Appian Corp. (NASDAQ: APPN), which raised about $75 million in a May stock offering.
"Open source projects are permeating every aspect of business operations and digital transformations," asserted Joe McCann, NodeSource's founder and CEO. "Node.js is emerging as the runtime of choice for DevOps…."
Among the reason for the success of Node.js are developers looking for more efficient ways of moving and crunching data than they have with Java, PHP, Ruby or Python. Another reason is the fact that that so many programmers are already familiar with JavaScript, making makes it relatively easy for them to be ramp up production on Node.js.
Those attributes prompted McCann to argue, "Node.js projects [are] being used as foundational in developing capabilities for many of the world’s most trafficked sites…" Those adopters include Mastercard (NYSE: MA), Netflix, (NASDAQ: NFLX) PayPal (NASDAQ: PYPL) and Wal-Mart (NYSE: WMT).
