6 things you should know about Node.js | JavaWorld
3. Sharing is encouraged
The ethos of the Node.js community is "share gleefully." It's frighteningly easy to share packages of library code -- technically, culturally, procedurally, and legally. The Node Package Manager is included with Node.js and has grown to a repository of nearly 50,000 packages, making it likely that another developer has already packaged up a solution to your problem, or even some less common ones.
Node.js' namespace philosophy is essentially the absence of one, letting any author publish under an unused module name in the shared public repository. Sharing code under the MIT open source license is highly recommended in the community, which also makes cross-pollination of code relatively worry-free (and lawyer-free) from an intellectual property perspective. Finally, the community is highly engaged in binding interesting C libraries like computer vision (OpenCV) and the Tesseract open source optical character library. The latter, for example, makes possible weekend projects like Imdex that process images from the Web so they can be automatically searched for written content.
4. Node Package Manager works broadly
Speaking of managing library dependencies, the Node Package Manager deserves to be called out. Node Package Manager is the root of almost all deployment systems for Node.js and underlies the many PaaS (platform-as-a-service) providers for Node.js, actually making it somewhat easy to move smaller applications between providers. Its simple, dependable package management has let the Node ecosystem grow extremely well in recent history, to the point that the underlying public service now needs to scale to the next level.
5. 'Batteries not included' minimalism
Node.js applications and Node.js Core itself are broken down into small modules that are composed and shared. Each package and tool can be scoped tightly and crafted to be manageable. These can then be baked together -- often without too much unnecessary kneading. The low-barrier, carefree nature of creating a module also encourages experimentation in the community, and there's quite a bit of overlap and experimentation in the package population. When executed well, each package typically handles one task (e.g. node-optimist.js: 'light-weight [command-line] option parsing').
6. Instrumentation
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