Comments on: Where is server side JavaScript?

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 18:09:48 +0000

You might want to look at Torino which provides a Mozilla Rhino JavaScript implementation hosted in a servlet-compatible server such as Tomcat or Glassfish. Server-side programming may be performed using scripts or server pages in the style of PHP and server-side APIs are provided by the Java runtime environment so Torino can do anything on the server you can do with Java including JDBC, XML, network access and so on. The Torino project is hosted on SourceForge at http://torino.sourceforge.net and is open-source (GPL3).

By: Hong Liang

Hong Liang — Wed, 14 May 2008 17:28:06 +0000

Hi guys! I’m very happy to see this post which let me know so many people are interested in server-side javascript. I have been working on a SSJS MVC framework for several weeks but at the moment there are something that prevent me from moving on. One of them is performance. Here’s the situation I meet right now.

My framework uses JDK6 and Jetty as servlet container. JDK6(aka Mustang) has its own javax.scripting feature so I don’t need to embed Rhino by myself. Jetty is very easy to embeded into other application. After all basic work had been done, I tried a simple code like this:

var str = “”;
for(var i=0; i (23.493ms)
1. run action invocation(23.283ms), 99.1%
2. StringView(str: value_0value_0value_0value_0value_0value_0) execution(0.21ms), 0.1%
23:32:44,316 INFO web request “index2″ —> (44.282ms)
1. run action invocation(43.585ms), 98.4%
2. StringView(str: value_0value_0value_0value_0value_0value_0) execution(0.19ms), 0%
23:32:47,178 INFO web request “index2″ —> (14.699ms)
1. run action invocation(14.507ms), 98.7%
2. StringView(str: value_0value_0value_0value_0value_0value_0) execution(0.13ms), 0.1%
23:32:47,546 INFO web request “index2″ —> (14.684ms)
1. run action invocation(14.497ms), 98.7%
2. StringView(str: value_0value_0value_0value_0value_0value_0) execution(0.13ms), 0.1%
23:42:24,005 INFO servlet… —> (0.915ms)
23:42:24,009 INFO servlet… —> (3.133ms)
23:42:24,012 INFO servlet… —> (0.962ms)
23:42:24,014 INFO servlet… —> (0.876ms)
23:42:24,023 INFO servlet… —> (8.026ms)
23:42:24,026 INFO servlet… —> (0.932ms)
23:42:24,029 INFO servlet… —> (2.451ms)

We can see clearly that “index2″(SSJS request) cost 10-20ms for each request on average, while servlet only did that in 1-2ms.

I’m really sad now. Should I continue to work on it? I’m also a little tired of Java, which in my opinion always turns simple things to complex. I’m considering to use PHP, not Java any more.

By: Fernando

Fernando — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 11:12:37 +0000

SSJavascript is suitable for being a standard (not like Visual Basic or C#).
Otherside, ASP, JSP are implementations of SSJavascript (view Wikipedia).
Nowday CGI and SCGI are too slow.
I think AJAX isn’t new compared with SSJavascript.
Could be PHP is only Server Side language ? Then I prefer two sides Javascript.
But PHP supports a lot of databases…

Fernando

By: Joachim Bengtsson

Joachim Bengtsson — Thu, 19 Jul 2007 11:07:23 +0000

@Jesse Thompson: That’s an awesomely excellent idea. A *lot* of people seem to dislike js just because it’s so often misused, but it really is a full-featured language. While I’d rather run ruby in browsers, js on servers seems a bit more viable ;)

JS could definitely be used more for other things as well, such as shell scripting and embedding (game scripting, etc).

By: Peter Wilson

Peter Wilson — Sat, 30 Jun 2007 19:55:41 +0000

Interested to know what build problems you’re having with Whitebeam. We’re only a small team so we build primarily for Fedora and OpenBSD (the ones we use). Build fine on them and is intended to be *nix friendly.

If you check the Whitebeam forumns on Sourceforge (http://www.sourceforge.net/projects/whitebeam) there are some messages from others on successful builds – and feedback on the issue they had so that we could improve the build process.

RPMs will be available shortly for recent Fedora builds. They can be built now.

By: Seth

Seth — Wed, 18 Apr 2007 19:13:34 +0000

I have been looking for the same thing. It totally blows my mind that people avoid any type of server side javascript programming. As AJAX becomes more and more popular, there will be more people working with various AJAX GUI toolkits. I am currently working on a server / client side solution. As most of my clients are on windows servers I’m building everything to support jscript / JScript.NET. I really hope I can find something supporting server side javascript on Apache soon. Maybe I’ll have to start something up on SourceForge.

By: Thiago Silva

Thiago Silva — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 21:50:33 +0000

I’m another one who got recently enlighted with the idea of using JavaScript on the server. It occurred to me (late, but thankfully ocurred ;) that it is a huge inefficiency to build applications with the miriads of languages (html, js, xml, your-preferred-server-side-lang,etc) and translations back and forth langs. Specially, nowadays, those ‘translations of objects’ (from, say PHP or ruby to javascript) with JSON, etc.

So, I’m urgently looking for a server-side javascript environment (ASP? no thanks) to get some great ideas going. With firefox extensions and client/server JavaScript, one can get pretty close to the vision of real distributed internet objects, and the expressiveness that this offers.

By: Mike Linksvayer » SXSW: JavaScript everywhere

Mike Linksvayer » SXSW: JavaScript everywhere — Sun, 11 Mar 2007 22:53:03 +0000

[...] the default glue and application language for the next decade on the web, desktop and the server. Where is server side JavaScript? from July 2005 continues to be one of the most viewed posts on this blog. Many people are thinking [...]

By: Calvin

Calvin — Fri, 09 Feb 2007 22:44:00 +0000

@Jesse Thompson

I totally agree with you. Javascript is such a versatile scripting language, and mature interpreters are already implemented (SpiderMonkey), all it needs is just a chance to attract enough attention to the general public. I am also a LAMP programmer, and the object programming of PHP5 never satisfy my needs. I think there are few things that can push SSJS further:

- make sure it does not repeat the quirky nature of PHP scripting (spaghetti code in html)
- complete MySQL / other dbms interface, ActiveRecord style
- rock solid MVC framework (like Rails and CakePHP)
- easy to deploy Apache SO module
- a community

It seems to me that MVC framework is the key to push forward the whole initiative. Few years ago almost no one knew about Ruby, until The Rails framework got this funny language known to the public. An active community is also very important.

By: Jesse Thompson

Jesse Thompson — Sun, 04 Feb 2007 10:16:58 +0000

I also am an ex-LAMP developer who is on a quest for the holy grail of Server Side Javascript. My dream implementation would be a Javascript environment tuned for *nix applications (sorry Franky/wxJS) that can actually build (sorry Whitebeam) and coordinate with a mature server such as apache (sorry firecat, Helma, Rhino, etc) to serve web requests.

Good would be having a working implementation of DBI and great would be having a CPAN like mechanism.. or even a way to utilize/wrap existing CPAN modules as a crutch to bootstrap the project.

With such a beast, one could do a lot of code reuse for specific but very irreducible tasks such as input verification and template infusing. Imagine writing just one slice of code that injects data into a template for display.. running it server-side to deliver a page with initial data, and then client side to manipulate the page in a Web2.0 application as the data changes. You could write an object which checks your form submissions client side to kindly warn the user they are being an idiot, and then re-run server side to harshly log/kline/narc the hacker who ignores all the client side warnings and attempts form smurfs manually.

Javascript/ECMAscript has an object model I can really dig, where PHP and Perl leave me wanting.. and C++ and Java leave me gagging. Ruby, while an interesting idea, will never reach the critical mass that JS has already attained. We need some real world, boots on the ground, SSJS.

Who’s with me? And, I guess, how do we do that? :)

Should there be a forum somewhere? I feel there should. We should try to crystalize a community around this.