While skimming through my RSS feed I stumbled upon an interesting article on Ajaxian about server side JavaScript programming.
I really, really enjoy writing JavaScript code so I decided to read through the article and take a look at the node.js library linked there.
Node is a framework to build server-side event-driven JavaScript applications. Developed in C++ on top of Google’s V8 JavaScript engine and accompanied by a set of JavaScript libraries Node seems to make building distributed (over a network), fast applications a piece of cake even for inexperienced developers.
Event-driven here really is the keyword because it represent a big change in the way applications are built (and architected in your brain).
Node is similar in design to and influenced by systems like Ruby’s Event Machine or Python’s Twisted. Node takes the event model a bit further—it presents the event loop as a language construct instead of as a library. In other systems there is always a blocking call to start the event-loop. Typically one defines behavior through callbacks at the beginning of a script and at the end starts a server through a blocking call like
EventMachine::run(). In Node there is no such start-the-event-loop call. Node simply enters the event loop after executing the input script.
The example below (taken from Node’s website) will make everything clear… hopefully.
http = require(‘http’);
http.createServer(function (req, res) {
setTimeout(function () {
res.sendHeader(200, {‘Content-Type’: ‘text/plain’});
res.sendBody(‘Hello World’);
res.finish();
}, 2000);
}).listen(8000);
sys.puts(‘Server running at http://127.0.0.1:8000/’);
Can you see the beauty?!
I have only one worry. This is an open-source effort. The community behind it on Google groups is just 181 members strong (so far). What if node.js suddenly stops being the cool thing and the community disappears.
As much as I love writing JavaScript and I can really see the value in what they are building I’ll still wait until there are 100 Google Groups for node.js and a trillion members in each before using it in anything close to a production system.
Having said that I’m going back to writing silly node.js apps now. Well done to all the developers involved in the project and keep it up!
