Java + NodeJS communicating via socket: Bad Idea?

Question

I like some features of NodeJS, particularly JQuerification, websocket compatibility via socket.io, view and css engines that I cannot use with JSP (and of course, asynchron

Answer 1

To me the plan sounds reasonable per se. But from my experience it is important that your team is strong enough to bear it. In this case I would not go this route unless there are at least two good devs, one for the back-end part and one for the front-end. Otherwise it's just too easy to get lost when dealing with so many frameworks / concepts, and nothing gets finished.

Besides that I'd take care to make the communication layer between back- and front-end easily testable, which would rule out socket connections. If your performance requirements allow it, I'd opt for a browser-explorable REST style interface. This would also make it possible to drop the "fancy" front-end with reduced effort later on, and implement something in JSP or whatever. Just in case it gets out of hand...