1. Credit where the credit is due

    Development with Node.js can be fun and who better can vouch for this than us. We built ChoiceBeat entirely with Node.js and we loved it. Node.js can be an awesome framework for any lean startups where 2-3 people do everything. Starting from conceptualization to implementation requires lot of effort and the ecosystem around open source software can really extend you a helping hand.

    First of all thanks to Ryan Dahl for creating awesome node.js framework. The framework is getting matured and robust in every passing day. About javascript, someone mentioned, “Brick is becoming the wall”. This is so true. Thanks to Joyent and all contributors for making this framework rugged. There are many modules in Node.js that are simply extraordinary. Some of them that I used, worth a mention and I take this opportunity to extend my gratitude towards the creators. express, socket.io, jade, async, mongoose, redis, cluster, log4js and many more. I just loved using them. thank you guys. You all did a fantastic job. Pedro Teixeira of nodetut also presented some excellent tutorial. I used to refer them quite frequently.

    Next, big thank you goes to MONGO and REDIS. There are a lot of buzz around MongoDb these days and trust me, if your application needs to use a NoSql, schemaless, hash-map, document oriented, distributed data store, you can not ignore Mongo. One big feature that I am expecting from them is full text search capability.

    If your requirement is to have a data-structure in the database, REDIS should be your default choice. Their pub-sub capability is awesome. It’s a wonderful infrastructure to have in your system if you want to talk to the outside systems also apart from the regular pub sub usefulness. No doubt why VMWare acquired them. The great performance in Redis and Mongo come with the cost of a RAM. Both of them are RAM hungry.

    I could not have done the UI without some of the JQuery plugins that I am using. Thanks to all of them, especially highcharts, as I had to remove their credit from being appearing in the site.

    As usual, I am a big fan of the technology facebook is using. More than half a billion people using the infrastructure everyday and look at the performance. Isn’t it extra ordinary ? Anyway, my big thanks to them for I am using the authentication and authorization from facebook. I am also using many awesome plugins from them. Thanks a lot for developing these plugins. It makes life so easy.

    Big thanks to twitter, their performance is also great. I am also using sharethis. Thanks to them. I am not very sure about how many people actually use them. Same is the case with the contactme plugin. Thanks to all.

    We are thankful to Microsoft Bing and Yahoo’s Flickr, YQL, for we are using their APIs to source the images.

    Finally big thanks to Tumblr for giving me an infrastructure to write my static pages so smoothly. i am yet to figure out how visitors can comment.

    Guys wish me luck so that I can add many more features in ChoiceBeat with your help. Thanks a lot for making them available as open source and for free and that too probably with a better performance and scalability that most paid systems can not afford. Credit for building ChoiceBeat goes to you all.