The rise of server-side JavaScript

The rise of server-side JavaScript The beginnings, the present and
where we’re going Sunday, June 10, 12

Guillermo Rauch Sunday, June 10, 12

@rauchg Sunday, June 10, 12

devthought.com Sunday, June 10, 12

learnboost.com Sunday, June 10, 12

Started career in open-source Sunday, June 10, 12

Contributions to MooTools cs framework Sunday, June 10, 12

Took special interest in XHR and COMET Sunday, June 10,
12

PHP remained my backend language Sunday, June 10, 12

#facepalm Sunday, June 10, 12

Early interest in Rhino and v8cgi Sunday, June 10, 12

Early adopter of Spidermonkey-based APE Sunday, June 10, 12

Jumped to Node.JS Sunday, June 10, 12

Creator of socket.io realtime framework Sunday, June 10, 12

MongoDB monk and mongoose ORM Sunday, June 10, 12

distribute, up, browserbuild, juice & others Sunday, June 10, 12

Author of Smashing Node Sunday, June 10, 12

This marks the 20 slides about me milestone Sunday, June
10, 12

Sunday, June 10, 12

LearnBoost one of the ﬁrst 100% node webapps Sunday, June
10, 12

Creators of the Stylus CSS language Sunday, June 10, 12

Knox S3 client, tobi testing framework, cluster util Sunday, June
10, 12

How did JavaScript get there? Sunday, June 10, 12

Surprisingly, it all started in December, 1994 Sunday, June 10,
12

Attempt #1: Netscape Enterprise Server Sunday, June 10, 12

Introduced shortly after its arrival to the browser Sunday, June
10, 12

Fascinating tidbits from the press release in 1996: Sunday, June
10, 12

“Netscape Enterprise Server is the ﬁrst Web server to support
the Java and JavaScript programming languages, enabling the creation, delivery and management of live online applications” Sunday, June 10, 12

“Netscape Enterprise Server […] supports JavaScript, which enables users to
build applications that run on either the client or server anywhere on the network” Sunday, June 10, 12

16 years ago today. Sunday, June 10, 12

Sunday, June 10, 12

Mad props at the Netscape PR team Sunday, June 10,
12

Hint: the potential for SSJS was there all along Sunday,
June 10, 12

JavaScript was only used at the template layer Sunday, June
10, 12

Eventually discontinued in favor of JSP Sunday, June 10, 12

What did it look like? Sunday, June 10, 12

<html> <head> <title> Hello World </title> </head> <body> <h1> Hello
World </h1> <p>Your IP address is <server>write(request.ip);</server> Sunday, June 10, 12

Very similar to PHP: request = $_POST + $_SERVER client
= $_SESSION server = $_SERVER Sunday, June 10, 12

It shipped with an integrated “SS Web Inspector” Sunday, June
10, 12

Sunday, June 10, 12

Unlike enterprise webapp solutions to follow, NES was very lightweight
Sunday, June 10, 12

Directory structure was simple Sunday, June 10, 12

hangman.html hangman.js youwon.html youlost.html thanks.html images/ rules.html Sunday, June 10,
12

hangman.html hangman.js youwon.html youlost.html thanks.html images/ rules.html <server> Sunday, June
10, 12

Not source/org/netscape/www/app/main/app.js Sunday, June 10, 12

Compilation process was very straightforward Sunday, June 10, 12

jsac -v -o hangman.web hangman.html hangman.js Sunday, June 10, 12

Meanwhile, at the Legion of Doom Microsoft HQ Sunday, June
10, 12

In 1996, IIS 3.0 introduces JScript support Sunday, June 10,
12

In 1998, Netscape announces the Rhino Java JS VM Sunday,
June 10, 12

Sunday, June 10, 12

Netscape was working on its so-called Javagator Sunday, June 10,
12

A browser written entirely in Java Sunday, June 10, 12

Sunday, June 10, 12

Javagator was canceled, and Rhino became standalone Sunday, June 10,
12

It thus became the ﬁrst open-source JavaScript VM Sunday, June
10, 12

Hackers could now start new SSJS implementations Sunday, June 10,
12

At the same time, PHP3 is released Sunday, June 10,
12

It becomes the defacto scripting language for the web Sunday,
June 10, 12

Most notable Rhino-based effort is Helma, in 2005 Sunday, June
10, 12

That same year, PHP5 is announced with OOP support Sunday,
June 10, 12

What many see as the start of a middle-age crisis
Sunday, June 10, 12

In 2007, AppJet starts a Rhino-based SSJS app cloud Sunday,
June 10, 12

The most important predecessor to Node.JS Sunday, June 10, 12

With AppJet, an application called etherpad is written Sunday, June
10, 12

Sunday, June 10, 12

etherpad does two things differently Sunday, June 10, 12

1. It’s a realtime web application based on long-polling Sunday,
June 10, 12

Unlike every other implementation since NES… Sunday, June 10, 12

JS is no longer a PHP-style response handler Sunday, June
10, 12

2. etherpad truly beneﬁts from a single language Sunday, June
10, 12

Let’s go on a tangent Sunday, June 10, 12

Realtime collaboration is all about state syncing Sunday, June 10,
12

The algorithm that merges changes is called OT Sunday, June
10, 12

Sunday, June 10, 12

My name is John Sunday, June 10, 12

My name is John My name is John User A
User B Sunday, June 10, 12

User B #1 #1 Sunday, June 10, 12

User B #1 #1 concurrently Sunday, June 10, 12

User B #1 #1 concurrently My name is John Hello Sunday, June 10, 12

User B #1 #1 concurrently My name is John Hello My name is John Doe Sunday, June 10, 12

User B #1 #1 concurrently My name is John Hello My name is John Doe 1. Go to position 0 and remove 10 characters Sunday, June 10, 12

User B #1 #1 concurrently My name is John Hello My name is John Doe 1. Go to position 0 and remove 10 characters 2. Add “Hello” at position 0 Sunday, June 10, 12

User B #1 #1 concurrently My name is John Doe { “rev”: 1, “ops“: [ { “type“: “delete”, “pos”: 0, “length”: 10 } , { “type“: “add”, “pos”: 0, “text”: “Hello” } ]} Sunday, June 10, 12

User B #1 #1 concurrently { “rev”: 1, “ops“: [ { “type“: “delete”, “pos”: 0, “length”: 10 } , { “type“: “add”, “pos”: 0, “text”: “Hello” } ]} { “rev”: 1, “ops“: [ { “type“: “add”, “text”: “ Doe”, “pos”: 15 } ]} Sunday, June 10, 12

#3 John Hello Doe Sunday, June 10, 12

1. Go to position 0 and remove 10 characters 2.
Add “Hello” at position 0 3. Add “ Doe” at position 15 Sunday, June 10, 12

Add “Hello” at position 0 1. Add “ Doe” at position 15 || Sunday, June 10, 12

Add “Hello” at position 0 3. Add “ Doe” at position (15 - 10 + 5) Sunday, June 10, 12

Add “Hello” at position 0 3. Add “ Doe” at position (15 - 10 + 5) 1 Sunday, June 10, 12

Add “Hello” at position 0 3. Add “ Doe” at position (15 - 10 + 5) 2 Sunday, June 10, 12

Operational Transformations are executed both on the server and the
client Sunday, June 10, 12

The server keeps its own representation of the document Sunday,
June 10, 12

And only relays operations to clients as JSON Sunday, June
10, 12

JavaScript allows you write the rules once Sunday, June 10,
12

In 2009, several projects set out to solve similar problems
Sunday, June 10, 12

Spidermonkey-based APE tries to make COMET easy Sunday, June 10,
12

In the same spirit as AppJet, 10gen releases corejs Sunday,
June 10, 12

Load balancer + web server + scripting + database Sunday,
June 10, 12

Load balancer + web server + scripting + database MongoDB
Sunday, June 10, 12

MongoDB implements JSON BSON Sunday, June 10, 12

280north announces Narwhal, another SSJS platform Sunday, June 10, 12

CommonJS emerges to attempt to standardize SSJS Sunday, June 10,
12

But at the end of the year, Ryan Dahl comes
along Sunday, June 10, 12

Node.JS is introduced at JSConf Berlin Sunday, June 10, 12

It takes a fresh approach Sunday, June 10, 12

#1 it offers low-level abstractions Sunday, June 10, 12

“Hello World” = require(‘http’).createServer Sunday, June 10, 12

“Hello World” = require(‘http’).createServer ~CommonJS Sunday, June 10, 12

Sunday, June 10, 12

#2 non-blocking IO + V8 = focus on performance Sunday,
June 10, 12

#3 it has a small core Sunday, June 10, 12

#4 it has a great package manager, NPM Sunday, June
10, 12

In early 2010 I release socket.io, a ﬂagship module Sunday,
June 10, 12

Node eventually surpasses Rails in numbers of followers on GH,
then the most watched project Sunday, June 10, 12

Today there’s over 10,000 NPM projects Sunday, June 10, 12

And it has several major production deployments Sunday, June 10,
12

The strengths Sunday, June 10, 12

Realtime web Sunday, June 10, 12

We live in a JSON world Sunday, June 10, 12

Therefore, ideal for web services implementation and consumption Sunday, June
10, 12

No mind context-switches between multiple languages Sunday, June 10, 12

The weaknesses Sunday, June 10, 12

Callbacks make code harder to read and debug Sunday, June
10, 12

Some people use CoffeeScript Sunday, June 10, 12

Some people use CoffeeScript Just kidding Sunday, June 10, 12

Flexibility, leanness and abundance of choice can make the task
of choosing the best modules hard Sunday, June 10, 12

Where we’re going Sunday, June 10, 12

New NPM website will be like the “App store” of
Node Sunday, June 10, 12

Reviews and metrics will help people ﬁnd the right modules
for each task Sunday, June 10, 12

Rails-like monolithic frameworks are re-emerging Sunday, June 10, 12

Some are bringing coroutines back (node-ﬁbers) Sunday, June 10, 12

Others introduce “transpilers” that add new operators to make async
code more readable (IcedCoffeeScript) Sunday, June 10, 12

JavaScript as a language continues to evolve Sunday, June 10,
12

JavaScript as a language continues to evolve bloat? Sunday, June
10, 12

Google’s Dart tries to start over with a clean slate
Sunday, June 10, 12

Node clones continue to appear in other languages: Lua, C++11,
Java, Haskell, PHP (!) Sunday, June 10, 12

Questions? Sunday, June 10, 12

The rise of server-side JavaScript

The rise of server-side JavaScript

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