A couple of weeks after starting my remake of SeeThisSpot.com, and I think I can say that I’m so so so happy that I’ve done it, and am really excited about how it’s going to turn out.

The original see this spot was written in PHP, using the Cake framework, which was 100% new to me at the time. It’s clear now that I had no idea what I was doing implementing the site back then, and am now in love with the simplicity and ease of Node.js as a development language.

I love being able to use Javascript on both the client and server side. I always imagined SeeThisSpot being a very slick & smooth site that didn’t refresh the entire page, read: AJAX heavy. The ability to use the same language server side cuts down on what I need to learn to develop quickly. Previously I would have to look up how to convert a PHP object to JSON, and then back on the client side from JSON to a JS object, overcomplicated much?

I love callbacks. Once you get your head around the ‘disrupted’ flow of synchronous calls, ie that things don’t necessarily run one after the other, it make so much sense. Some (I) would argue actually flows much better!

I think I might love Jade. But I’m not sold 100% just yet. I have run into a couple of little hiccups which I found difficult to track down (trying to insert data that doesn’t exist). I will reserve judgement for now and see how it goes. One thing I definitely do love though is the ability to use a jade template to render a partial view for an AJAX call, I guess this is a pretty standard use case, but it was incredibly difficult to work out for CakePHP.

You can try out the new SeeThisSpot implementation at http://seethisspot.herokuapp.com/. It is still very raw, so be nice