66 posts tagged “nodejs”
2009
Perl: Love it, or hate it, but don’t ignore it. Phillip Smith calls me out for omitting Perl from my list of Node.js event loop alternatives (I only mentioned Twisted and EventMachine). No conspiracy here, I’m just not connected enough to the Perl community to know what the popular event loop libraries are. To Perl’s credit, Perlbal was the first piece of software I saw that showed me how a single threaded, event loop based system could massively outperform a threaded alternative.
Request Routing With URI Templates in Node.JS. I quite like this approach (though the implementation is a bit “this” heavy for my taste). JavaScript has no equivalent to Python’s raw strings, so regular expression based routing ala Django ends up being a bit uglier in JavaScript. URI template syntax is more appealing.
Node.js is genuinely exciting
I gave a talk on Friday at Full Frontal, a new one day JavaScript conference in my home town of Brighton. I ended up throwing away my intended topic (JSONP, APIs and cross-domain security) three days before the event in favour of a technology which first crossed my radar less than two weeks ago.
[... 2,025 words]node.js at JSConf.eu (PDF). node.js creator Ryan Dahl’s presentation at this year’s JSConf.eu. The principle philosophy is that I/O in web applications should be asynchronous—for everything. No blocking for database calls, no blocking for filesystem access. JavaScript is a mainstream programming language with a culture of callback APIs (thanks to the DOM) and is hence ideally suited to building asynchronous frameworks.
Going evented with Node.js. Comprehensive Node.js tutorial—from basic principles to installation and writing a simple Twitter search command-line client application.
node.js. “Evented I/O for V8 JavaScript”—a JavaScript environment built on top of the super-fast V8 engine which provides event-based IO functionality for building highly concurrent TCP and HTTP servers. The API design is superb—everything is achieved using JavaScript events and callbacks (even regular file IO) and the small standard library ships with comprehensive support for HTTP and DNS. Overall it’s very similar to Twisted and friends, but JavaScript’s anonymous function syntax feels more natural than the Python equivalent. It compiles cleanly on Snow Leopard. Definitely a project to watch.