A+ Ajax

By Dion Almaer
webOS 2.0 SDK has just launched, and it has node.js built in (and more). The following is taken from my personal blog

At our last Palm Developer Day, Ben and I discussed future APIs for webOS including “JavaScript services” as a way to write code that runs on the other side of the device service bus using JavaScript.

If you think about it, node delivers a services platform for the cloud, so is there a way that we could work together? We got together with Ryan Dahl of Node to try this out, and it turns out that node works fantastically well on a mobile device! Major kudos should go to the V8 team for creating a great VM and to Ryan for writing efficient code that scaled down from the cloud to the device.

Today we announce that node is part of webOS 2.0:

The popular Node.js runtime environment is built into webOS 2.0, which means that you can now develop not just webOS apps but also services in JavaScript. The active Node ecosystem is on hand to provide community support and a rapidly growing library of modules that you can use in your webOS services.

Besides powering the new Synergy APIs, JavaScript services strengthen webOS’s support for background processing and add new capabilities—like low-level networking, file system access, and binary data processing—to the web technology stack.

I am really excited about this move for us. The node community is top class. I get to see this time and time again, most recently over the weekend and this week as I judge the node knockout. There is magic in the air with Node. It feels like the Rails days. I remember being so happy to jump to Rails and get away from the heavy world of Enterprise Java. It was a breath of fresh air to not have to argue with folks about every piece of the stack. “What about JSF with HiveMind and Commons-Logging and ….” Argh! Too. Much. Choice. And, a logging abstraction above Log4J was hilarious :)

Node is low level, yet simple. It is more like Sinatra than Rails. The event-based opinions keep you in good stead, and with cloud solutions such as Heroku and no.de you have great deployment stories, unlike Rails back in the day.

If you check out the modules that are growing daily, and the fun real-time hacks from the knockout you will get a good feel for node.

It feels great to have webOS as the first mobile device that embeds node. With db8 we offer a JSON store than can sync to the cloud (e.g. sync with CouchDB). This stack is starting to look pretty great.

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Node eventually wants to support all POSIX operating systems (including Windows with MinGW) but at the moment it is only being tested on Linux, Macintosh, and Solaris.

At the Node.js meetup in Palo Alto, someone asked about running node on Windows, and the answer wasn’t pretty yet. You can probably hack it together, and it is coming, but today? Painful. It hasn’t seemed to be a huge issue though ;)

However, if you are interested in running Node on Windows, and the idea of this excites you:

C:\> node.exe server.js

… then you can thank Dan Newcome for creating Node.net which gives ya:

• Same theory of operation as Node.js (single threaded eventing front-end, non-blocking IO back-end)
• API compatibility with Node.js
• Written entirely in Javascript (JScript.NET)
• Runs on the .NET runtime

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I love programmers like Alex Miltsev. He won the Jetpack 0.5 content by prototyping access to the GPU from JavaScript!

Alex’s work is an alpha-prototype that shows the feasibility of the project and it requires a custom build of Firefox to use — it’s not easy to demo. However, the code sample below shows how the technology works. In this example, we are transposing a matrix at lightening speed:

PLAIN TEXT

JAVASCRIPT:

1.  
2. jetpack.statusBar.append({
3.   html: “Transpose!”,
4.   onReady: function(widget){
5.     $(widget).click(function(){
6.       var myStorage = jetpack.cuda-storage;
7.       var matrix = new Array();
8.       var size = 32;
9.       for(var i=0; i<size *size; ++i)
10.         array[i] = i;
11.       var transposedMatrix = myStorage.transpose(size, matrix);
12.       transposedMatrix.forEach(function (v) { console.log( v ); })
13.     });
14. });
15.  

Alex discussed why this matters:

People are using the internet to collaborate more than ever before. Collaboration on the internet has been evolving at a rapid pace, and the applications and technology that will drive the next wave of internet collaboration will require even greater technical complexity and more significant computing resources than is currently available through the browser environment today. While text documents, videos, music, and image-base forms of collaboration are now common place, there are many needs require a level of compute performace beyond the web platform as it exists today, such as:

• consumption of high-quality digital video or music streams,
• complex image or speech recognition,
• manipulation and processing large pictures of nature or space,
• processing large sets of tabular data locally in the browser,
• complex animations with DOM elements (via DirectX or OpenGL),
• exploring 3D worlds, such as SecondLife or an OpenSim Grid,
• real-time audio and video editing,
• having an integrated development environment that runs entirely in the browser

There are endless examples of such complex uses of the internet platform that are just not feasible with the status quo web platform. Developers have tried to overcome such barriers in the past with client-side enhancements like ActiveX, Netscape Plugins, Java Applets, but each in its own way was flawed and failed to gain mass adoption. It is possible that the Native Client project will change all this, but standardization of such initiatives across the browser landscape is a lengthy endeavor. For the near future the tools that the developer uses to provide a rich user experience remain JavaScript and ActionScript, plug-ins, such as the ones previously mentioned, are significantly limited by the architectural mismatch of performance requirements they place on the CPU.

Ben tends to get a little giddy when he hears about GPU access :)

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