Dion’s cartoon resonated with me:
Resonated because only last night I was thinking it’s about time I actually started playing with server-side Javascript, and wrote my first, extremely dumb, AppJet app. I will hopefully make it, like, actually do something at some stage.
I’ve discussed the potential of server-side Javascript before, and the more I think about, the more I like it. Javascript is a sophisticated language and, by now, a language very familiar to many professional web developers.
The real gap is in server-side frameworks and hosting. There’s no “killer app” Javascript server, a la what Rails did to Ruby. I haven’t even heard of most of the SSJS frameworks listed in Wikipedia. Furthermore, try finding a virtual host that supports Javascript! You would practically need one that support Java, so you can run Rhino or whatever, and few virtual hosts do that. At least Python and Ruby were running on many virtual hosts before Django and Rails showed up. For that reason, the model pursued by AppJet seems worthy. If they can come up with a solid virtualisation environment for Javascript, they may be on to a big winner. They could be the BEA or JBoss of 2015 (2010 seems a bit early for all that!). And if the rumour is true they’re using Scala, they’ll get doubleplus-coolness votes for language selection.
3 responses so far ↓
1 JayFresh // Jan 23, 2008 at 8:47 am
So, which language would you run a server-side js intepreter? What’s bad about Rhino?
2 Uri // Jan 24, 2008 at 9:05 am
The Ajax Design Patterns book has gotten a lot of mileage here at Aptana, so we’d love to get your thoughts on Jaxer, which we released just this week: http://www.aptana.com/jaxer .
BTW I didn’t know Dion was such an artist!
3 mahemoff // Jan 25, 2008 at 10:02 am
@JayFresh I was going to answer the first comment with the second comment…I think Jaxer has the right approach, which is to use something in C/C++ that can be made executable. As Mozilla runs on a multitude of platforms, with Spidermonkey underneath, hopefully it will turn out to be a very portable model.
@Uri:
The timing of all this was interesting. There’s definitely a confluence going on here. I’m very excited about Jaxer and think it has great potential. The possibility that it will be able to work on standard hosting services, so long as they have mod_jaxer installed, and without being dependent on Java, which has never taken off on virtual hosts. Hopefully the community will influence the providers in this direction. It’s also great to see a well-backed open-source solution, I would have preferred it to see an Apache/MIT license, but it’s still a vast improvement over other efforts.
The out-of-the-box experience for Jaxer is great and I’m keen to write something semi-serious with it and put it up on a VPS box.
Dion’s using Toonlet.com for his cartoons, something I need to try at some stage :).
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