node.js

Submitted by Bill St. Clair on Mon, 02 Apr 2012 01:08:26 GMT  <== Computers ==> 

Following a Google+ link from Rob Malda, I looked tonite at node.js. It's a portable JavaScript engine, with a nice event-driven I/O library. Binaries just worked on my iMac. Source built on my FreeBSD web server after I installed one small library (/usr/ports/devel/libexecinfo). It's the Chrome JavaScript runtime, running basically anywhere. Your webapps can now be JavaScript on both web browser and server. Not sure if that's a good thing, but it seems neat right now.

It has brought to mind my copy of the old MIT maze game (billstclair.com/jmaze), which I wrote many years ago in Java. I may start building a new one, JavaScript in the browser for the players, and node.js on the server. Should be fun, and probably not overly complicated. I played the MIT version in the mid-seventies on the Project Mac PDP-10s, running ITS, with Imlac display terminals.

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