Thanks for the response, it helped a bit. 
I did manage to get this running at least, though I needed a few more steps than were in your readme - if others are going to try this in my situation, then it may be worth mentioning them:
I am running this on Windows, and have no experience of node.js or nmp.
I had to run 'nmp link' in the xi4n folder.
I also had to run 'npm install <module>' as I had several error messages reporting missing modules. I imagine this was due to a fresh install of node.js, though I'm not at all sure.
I haven't looked at the code yet. I don't know a great deal about JS either, but it looks interesting.

I did manage to get this running at least, though I needed a few more steps than were in your readme - if others are going to try this in my situation, then it may be worth mentioning them:
I am running this on Windows, and have no experience of node.js or nmp.
I had to run 'nmp link' in the xi4n folder.
I also had to run 'npm install <module>' as I had several error messages reporting missing modules. I imagine this was due to a fresh install of node.js, though I'm not at all sure.

I haven't looked at the code yet. I don't know a great deal about JS either, but it looks interesting.

Patches welcome if you wanna come and play though
I've tried to make it so that the new style doesn't break the old style though
