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JavaScript Servers Compared

Posted by samzenpus on from the taking-them-for-a-spin dept.

snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Peter Wayner test-drives five leading JavaScript servers and finds the results compelling though still a work-in-progress. 'I enjoyed the challenge and stimulation of rethinking everything I know about the server, but I still found myself hesitant to push these new ideas too far or too fast. The speed of experimentation and development is heady and exciting to the open source crowd, but it will probably seem scary to corporate developers who like the long, stable lives of tools from Microsoft or Oracle. Some of these platforms will probably morph three or four times over the next few years, something that won't happen to the good, old JSP standard in the Java world,' Wayner writes in review of Node.js, Jaxer, EJScript, RingoJS, and AppengineJS."

6 of 132 comments (clear)

  1. Second post! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

    Second post! Would've been first if slashdot had a faster javascript server.

  2. Third post by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

    Third post! Would've been first if slashdot had a faster javascript server.

  3. Print version of the article by Kenz0r · · Score: 5, Informative

    Read the print version of the article in one page:
    http://www.infoworld.com/print/161969

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    +1 Funny Signature
  4. You are a renegade. by not+already+in+use · · Score: 5, Funny

    Remember when javascript had a terrible rep? Then people were all like, "No! It's totally awesome! It has first-class functions and prototypal inheritance!" Yeah, you remember. You read all the blogs. You had flashbacks to your not-so-pleasant encounters with javascript while developing client-side web applications. Then, all the sudden, prototypal inheritance became the in-thing, like popped collars. No matter how ugly or ridiculous it looked, you didn't want to be the only one who didn't think it was cool. You started writing gobs of hard to organize, impossible to refactor serverside javascript code. You convinced yourself, somehow, that you saved time by not having to issue some "compile" command. No, it just starts, DYNAMICALLY! What a cool word, dynamic -- like Ugg boots! And like wearing Ugg boots in the summertime, you tortured yourself searching for simple runtime errors. Static checking? Compiling? These are the things of white-collared enterprise folks.

    You are not a white collared enterprise guy. You are a renegade. With a popped-collar. And ugg boots.

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    Similes are like metaphors
    1. Re:You are a renegade. by tixxit · · Score: 4, Informative

      Prototypical inheritance didn't make JS cool, and JS wasn't the reason we hated JS 10 years ago.

      The reason JS was hated so much 10 years ago was because of the DOM. That's it. Every browser had close enough implementations that you thought mucking about with the DOM would be simple... but they were different enough to cause endless headaches and hardcoded hacks to work around all sorts of quirks. Making a simple drop-down menu meant coding everything from scratch, maintaining essentially 3 different versions of the same code for different browsers.

      JS is cool today because of many things.

      The convergence of browser features and DOM implementations towards the standard. Coding JS to work cross browser has definitely gotten easier.

      The proliferation of browser libraries that abstract the browser away from us developers and handle all the little DOM implementation differences for us.

      There is a solid (and growing) set of best practices for client-side programming (eg. progressive enhancement, event-driven programming, etc.). This has dramatically cut down on the amount of time spent (re)writing JS and let's people create better abstractions that work well with JS.

      The functional aspect of JS is definitely nice, and allows for some very concise code (considering) to be written. However, it can also be eschewed for those that are not comfortable with functional programming.

      JS is SIMPLE. In the browser it is single threaded. You don't need to worry about concurrent programming. The language itself is also dead simple, but still very powerful if needed.

      However, I don't think people think prototypical inheritance is really all the grand. It's simple, is what it is and that fits well with JS (simple). When most the original crop of modern JS frameworks came out, the first order of business was to build a more traditional class-based inheritance approach. I know it doesn't fit well with your "renegade" theory, but it's true. People now seem to be getting comfortable with prototypical inheritance, but I don't think you'll find many people willing to extol its virtues.

      Also, JS has first class functions, yes, but so do LOTS of other languages. I'm not sure why you're picking on JS developers for liking some aspects of functional programming.

  5. Re:The only good JavaScript is a contained JavaScr by GreyLurk · · Score: 3, Interesting

    In terms of numerical computation? Probably. In terms of actual useful web applications, Node.js meets or beats compiled Java in the benchmarks that I've seen, even with the Java Code using esoteric and not commonly used behaviours like Non-Blocking IO: http://www.subbu.org/blog/2011/03/nodejs-vs-play-for-front-end-apps

    V8 is actually really damn fast.