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May 13

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Server-side JavaScript and 3rd devmeeting

Have you ever heard about JavaScript? Of course you have! And maybe you didn’t like it as much as I didn’t around 5 years ago. I didn’t like it mostly because it was really hard to debug. But after Firefox and its plug-in Firebug appeared it started to be a lot easier. Not mentioning here Google Chrome and its Inspector. And nowadays even IE has something built-in like Firebug for Firefox! :)

Why am I writing it? Because today I know JavaScript is AWESOME! It is still mostly used as a presentation language on many websites (to make them more interactive) and still I understand theoretically closures. But anyway, I want to know it better because there are also more and more browser and mobile games written in JavaScript. Some polish tech-portals even went a step further and they predicted in this decade JavaScript would get really popular. And it will be the first cross-platform language and new leader among programming languages, they’ve written.

However, I’m a newbie and I don’t have much experience in writing in JavaScript, so things are pretty slow till I got them done. Tomorrow is another devmeeting which I’m going to attend to and I needed to have NodeJs and RingoJs installed on my laptop. As I remembered well, last time I took me few hours and I didn’t install NodeJs finally. I got a pizza, some beer, girls went out today and I was ready for the battle. But guess what?

$ python 
Python 2.6.5 (r265:79063, Apr 16 2010, 13:09:56)

(OK, their recommendation is equal or higher than 2.4)

$ mkdir ~/local/nodejs-test/
$ cd ~/local/nodejs-test/
$ sudo apt-get install python-software-properties
...
$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:jerome-etienne/neoip
...
$ sudo apt-get update
..
$ sudo apt-get install nodejs
...
$ npm install express

And that’s it! Can you imagine that? Last time I’ve been trying to build and install NodeJS for hours and I didn’t make it out. Today it took me several minutes. I tested my installation with example code on the main page of node.js. This is another important thing in “world of JavaScript”. One: NodeJS as jQuery Mobile and other JavaScript projects have a great community. Two: NodeJS is still a beta version and it’s been used several times at production environments of several projects as I’ve read.

How was it with RingoJS? It was even easier (at last with my Ubuntu). I’ve just run .deb file downloaded from page of RingoJS. It’s been installed in /usr/share/ringojs/. I’ve just ran the demo and it worked! :) Again — several minutes.

$ ringo /usr/share/ringojs/apps/demo/main.js
0    [main] INFO  ringo.webapp.daemon  - init
1951 [main] INFO  ringo.webapp.daemon  - start
1953 [main] INFO  org.eclipse.jetty.util.log  - jetty-7.1.6.v20100715
2127 [main] INFO  org.eclipse.jetty.util.log  - Started SelectChannelConnector@0.0.0.0:8080
2127 [main] INFO  ringo.httpserver  - Server on http://localhost:8080 started.

Conclusion: using JavaScript and tools related to it is getting really easy. The community connected to this language seems as a really nice bunch of geeks who are doing their work as fast and good as it’s possible. Everything looks like JavaScript will get more popularity in next few years because it’s not only client-side language, anymore. And all of that pure facts leads me to learn this awesome language better and try to start few projects based on it.

And I’ll try to post something about workshop/devmeeting which I’ll attend to, tomorrow.

Cheers,
Andrew.

Permanent link to this article: https://blog.lukaszewski.it/2011/05/13/server-side-javascript-and-devmeeting/

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