Why a JavaScript hater thinks everyone needs to learn JavaScript in the next year. I’ve long looked at JavaScript as a second-class citizen in the programming world. Early on, it was the source of numerous security problems; it was a nice bit of glue to patch together HTML applications with a bit of styling, but nobody would use it for serious code; and so forth. Java, Ruby, Python, they were the languages for doing real work.
But my attitude toward JavaScript has changed completely in the past few years. JavaScript has “grown up.” The potential of Node.js Node.js has the potential to revolutionize web development. Two things make Node particularly valuable, though. Second, Node has benefitted from an enormous pool of JavaScript developers. At this point, writing Node applications is relatively crude: it’s a low-level library, about as close to the metal as you can get with JavaScript. I’ve mentioned the appearance of sophisticated web applications that run almost entirely in the browser. HTML5 is about JavaScript JavaScript and databases, compilers and languages. Mark Nielsen: PixelJET - Dreamweaver mee...
How Facebook Ships Code « FrameThink – Frameworks for Thinking People. I’m fascinated by the way Facebook operates. It’s a very unique environment, not easily replicated (nor would their system work for all companies, even if they tried). These are notes gathered from talking with many friends at Facebook about how the company develops and releases software. Seems like others are also interested in Facebook… The company’s developer-driven culture is coming under greater public scrutiny and other companies are grappling with if/how to implement developer-driven culture. The company is pretty secretive about its internal processes, though. Facebook’s Engineering team releases public Notes on new features and some internal systems, but these are mostly “what” kinds of articles, not “how”… So it’s not easy for outsiders to see how Facebook is able to innovate and optimize their service so much more effectively than other companies.
HUGE thanks to the many folks who helped put together this view inside of Facebook. Notes: What do you think? Like this: Twitter Announces Fire Hose Marketplace: Up to 10k Keyword Filters for 30 Cents! Like a prism to a ray of sunlight, stream-hacking startup Mediasift CEO Nick Halstead took the stage today with Twitter's Ryan Sarver at the Data 2.0 conference to announce Twitter's second data resales channel partnership.
Halstead's service will allow customers to parse the full Twitter fire hose along any of the 40 fields of data hidden inside every Tweet, with the addition of augmented data layers from services including Klout (influence metrics), PeerIndex (influence), Qwerly (linked social media accounts) and Lexalytics (text and sentiment analysis). Storage, post-processing and historical snapshots will also be available. The price? Dirt cheap. Halstead told me after the announcement that customers would be able to apply as many as 10,000 keyword filters to the fire hose for as little as 30 cents an hour. Above: Thanks to Qwerly integration, when you look at a Twitter @username - Mediasift sees more than just the Twitter profile.
Below: This is what a Tweet looks like. Scale your JavaScript, scale your team. Lisp Bot Wins Google AI Challenge — Will Lisp Win in the Semantic Web, Too? The prize for Google’s AI challenge – creating a bot to play the game Planet Wars as intelligently as possible – has been taken by a developer from semantic web vendor Franz Inc. Gábor Melis, who works on the company’s Lisp-based AI database, claimed the win for his Lisp-built Bocsimacko bot that rocked in completing each of 200 turns in one second in a single thread of code. That’s cool, but even cooler is that what Melis did in taking his observations of how humans solve the challenges of the Planet Wars game – defending their turf, allocating surplus resources for colonization and attacking opponents – and making a prototype of those heuristics in LISP may foreshadow how that programming language can have greater resonance in a Semantic Web world. As Melis describes programming in the language, “it’s almost a continuous feedback loop between coding and thinking, and this is where Lisp is great as a tool for prototyping,” he says.
New directions in web architecture. Again. In 2005, Jesse James Garrett at Adaptive Path published the seminal blog “Ajax: A New Approach to Web Applications” and ushered in new age of web architecture. Ajax meant using the possibilities latent in JavaScript (specifically, the XMLHttpRequest object) so that a web page could contact the server asynchronously and request new data.
This was revolutionary; within months, we were seeing pages that were more dynamic and interactive. Ajax short-circuited the submit/response loop that dominated web applications up to that time. Instead of making an HTTP request, receiving an entire web page, and rendering that page as a replacement for the current page, the browser requested a chunk of data. It used that chunk of data to interact with the DOM and rewrite the page it was displaying on the fly. Around the same time, the RESTful paradigm started taking hold. Important as Ajax and REST have been to the history of the web, each only represents half of a larger revolution. Related: 4 (More) Tools for Teaching Kids to Code. This week is National Computer Education Week, aimed at recognizing the crucial role of computing in today's world and at supporting efforts to boost computer science education at all levels. The event purposefully coincides with Grace Hopper's birthday tomorrow. But it also happens to come the same week that the Program for International Student Assessment has released its data about student performance and finds that, compared to others worldwide, U.S. students get a C for math and science.
According to ACM and CSTA, two organizations that address computer science education, very few states recognize computer science as a core graduation requirement, and states' curriculum standards focus on computing skills rather than computing concepts. (You can see an interactive map of how the different states compare). We wrote a story earlier this fall with 4 suggestions for some of our favorite programming tools aimed at kids.
Kodu Small Basic Arduino Squeak. Lagoa Multiphysics 1.0 - Teaser. Jolie O'Dell: Gowalla CTO on using Ruby... Metamarkets Blog » Blog Archive » Node.js and the Javascript Age. Three months ago, we decided to tear down the framework we were using for our dashboard, Python’s Django, and rebuild it entirely in server-side JavaScript, using node.js. (If there is ever a time in a start-ups life to remodel parts of your infrastructure, it’s early on, when your range of motion is highest.) This decision was driven by a realization: the LAMP stack is dead. In the two decades since its birth, there have been fundamental shifts in the web’s make-up of content, protocols, servers, and clients.
Together, these mark three ages of the web: I. 1991-1999: The HTML Age. The HTML Age was about documents, true to Tim Berners-Lee’s original vision of a “big, virtual documentation system in the sky.” II. 2000-2009: The LAMP Age. The LAMP Age was about databases. III. 2010-?? The JavaScript age is about event streams. To recognize this means shifting our view of the server from a document courier (HTML Age), or a template renderer (LAMP Age), to a function and data shipper. JavaScript spread to the edges and became permanent in the process. At some point, when nobody was looking, JavaScript evolved from humble beginnings to become an important and full-fledged development language. James Duncan (@jamesaduncan), the chief architect at Joyent, is one of the people who’s now putting JavaScript in unexpected places.
In his case, it’s using JavaScript as a web server development language through the Node.js platform. In the following interview, Duncan shares his thoughts on JavaScript’s growth and how we came to depend so heavily on the language. For a lot of us who have been in the industry for a while, JavaScript has always seemed like a toy language. When did that change? James Duncan: The big change started when Google launched Maps. What’s happening now is that JavaScript is installed on millions and millions of edges of our network. In the same way that C has become permanent at the systems level, with JavaScript, what you’ve got is a situation where it’s on so many edges of the network, it really can never be eliminated.