Hi! My name is Jordan and I'm a USDSer at the DoD. I'll be sharing my experiences trying to open source software within the DoD at the upcoming Mid-Atlantic Developer Conference in Baltimore (Aug 1-2). As Robbie mentioned, some of us also participate in many of the user groups around town, including DCJS and Women Who Code DC.
Seems like these tools are still evolving, wondering how long it will take for these to really be adopted in enterprise orgs (thus fueling more growth).
I'd agree that Node.js is pretty dang nice for RESTful APIs. The fully asynchronous nature means really great throughput on the server, especially when most of your processing time is spent in DB or file I/O (as is often the case in APIs). As for disadvantages... I dunno. I guess if you don't really know JS very well it could be difficult to get into, and good developers are harder to find than in some other languages. But as a platform for APIs it's pretty solid.
Or just require devs to use --harmony. I think there are a couple modules that do so... like koa. :)
Of course, since that's basically "experimental" I guess people would think your module is also "experimental". But I think let and const are pretty darn stable.
Not sure if I agree that everyone wants a single Node (Isaac's first point), but I agree with most of the points. That said, I don't know that we will get to reunification. :/
The license is one benefit, yes... but the StrongLoop PM also has support for deployment across multiple machines and integration with nginx for load balancing. And everything can be monitored (including across machines) from a single GUI: StrongLoop Arc.
pm2 is great, but this is not an "added features" play, StrongLoop wrote this process manager from scratch based on experience with very large enterprise clients. In other words, this is a new beast entirely!