Are there anyone in HN community using Node.js for mission critical backends? Even though I am perfectly happy to do that and does, especially with Typescript support, I have seen increasing number of backend devs who are more comfortable to use a static typed stack like Java or Go. Wonder if Node.js will ever get wider adoption like Java got.

We use it for a mission-critical backend in TypeScript. After 20 years (was previously primarily a Java programmer for the first part of my career) I feel I have finally hit environment "nirvana" with having our front-end in React/TypeScript, backend in Node/TypeScript with API in Apollo GraphQL, DB is Postgres.

Having the same language across our entire stack has huge, enormous, gargantuan benefits that shouldn't be underestimated, especially for a small team. Being able to easily move between backend and frontend code bases has had a gigantic positive impact on team productivity. Couple that with auto-generating client and server-side typescript files from our GraphQL API schema definition has made our dev process pretty awesome.

camjohnson26

I’ve got a similar stack, what are you using for ORM? Started using Prisma to replace TypeORM/TypeGraphQL but it’s new and unproven. Also are you caching with Redis, any other utilities helping with that? GraphQL-codegen is a lifesaver for generating gql types and resolvers.

hn_throwaway_99

We are not using an ORM. I am a pretty strong advocate against ORMs, but that is a topic for a different discussion. We have a set of DAO components that access the DB using Slonik, https://github.com/gajus/slonik (overview explaining the rationale for this library is at https://medium.com/@gajus/bf410349856c ).

Our app doesn't have a huge need for caching, but we use a mix of in-server-memory caching ( https://github.com/isaacs/node-lru-cache ) and Redis when we need a global cache.