It really depends on your use case. There are some things that Node is better suited for, and other things that Java does better. Part of the advantage of microservices is that you don't have to chose 1 or the other. You can use Java to do what it does better, and you can use Node to do what it does better. Your job is to solve problems, not follow trends. Analyze your needs, and implement the better solution. Whatever current trends might be doesn't have a lot of impact on that. More on reddit.com

Few off the top of my head. NodeJS should only be picked if your load is almost entirely IO bound. You will see very few of the benefits otherwise. NodeJs codebases tend to scale smoothly until under full load while Java codebases front load a bit more. When under a full load it will depend on what sort of load to determine which one is better/faster. In general nodejs codebases perform better in horizontal scaling situations when you are running many small boxes while Spring boot/Java can better take advantage of vertical scalability. If you have one or two large servers running your application Java may outperform nodejs as it can take advantage of multiple cores when under load. Java is compiled and statically typed which eliminates several categories of bugs and you never have to worry about invalid code. NodeJS codebases require more written tests for the same guarantees and the inclusion of typescript. At the same time if your application does little with the data passing through its system it can feel like types are a burden instead of a boon. Java's tooling and deployment is a bit more complicated than NodeJs. Its changed a bunch over the years and it can be daunting to the inexperienced. Spring boot makes this easy if you follow their doc closely and don't try to figure it out on your own. Spring boot is a collection of libraries primarily centered around spring framework and bring in concepts you may not be familiar with. It would be more accurate to compare it to something like NestJS than NodeJS. You can pick a simpler Java framework to get started as there are many that can compare similarly to something like express in NodeJS. In my opinion, Java's standard API is easier to work with than NodeJS for a number of tasks. You may not encounter this in a simple application though. Spring boot codebases have certain common conventions on organizing code. This is useful to the experienced but can be overwhelming to new developers. tldr; If you are building a small web application that primarily talks to remote services like a DB use nodejs and you will get up and running faster. For larger apps or where performance is critical it would highly depend on what your application is doing for the choice to matter. More on reddit.com

It’s more about the concepts. Are you familiar with (or do you want to learn) how Spring works? Learning Java is not hard. It’s dot notation, like JS, but it’s compiled, there’s strict typing, and much more heavily focused around OOP. How well do you know OOP? How familiar are you with abstraction? If I were you, I’d stick with something like Nest.JS and focus on learning proper typescript, and then move into Java. If you’re not good with key programming principles, then Java will be brutally hard. If you’re familiar with stuff like OOP, inheritance, polymorphism, abstraction, singletons, factory methods, et al., then Java might be a good challenge! Also, consider time. Do you have the time to learn Java? Or would that time be better spent on learning a solid TS framework, like Nest.JS? I’d say learn TypeScript properly, and focus on Nest.JS (or some other framework), and then learn Java and port your api to it when you have the time! Good luck either way, bud! [EDIT] career wise, don’t worry. PLENTY of node jobs out there! But be sure to stand out by knowing programming principles, not just node. I’m a hiring manager. I literally don’t give a fuck if you know how to make an express app. I care that you know how to stream a file, what buffers are, how to find performance issues, database normalization, et al. If you know that, learning a new language becomes a lot easier! More on reddit.com

This is slightly related but this thread seems to have a misunderstanding.

Node is a runtime.

JavaScript is an implementation of ECMAScript. JavaScript is a language. Node takes a JavaScript program as input and translates that to C++ and runs it on the host machine.

TypeScript is a typed superset of JavaScript. TypeScript transpiles to JavaScript. That transpiled JavaScript is run by Node.

I find Node easy to work with and I build production-grade Node systems that receive 100m+ requests per day (Kubernetes infrastructure)

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