Ajaxian

With the debut of Vert.x, the asynchronous framework is reaching an inflection point, suggests Andrew Cholakian. With Vert.x, the software is packaged together in such a way as to be extremely practical, he states. For some JVM zealots, Vert.x may meet needs recently and apparently addressed by node.js.

Vert.x is an asynchronous application server – which may prove useful as architects rethink the server’s role in a world of powerful clients. Does the JVM have a role going forward? Some might say ‘no’ to the JVM. Many say ‘Yes’. Some of these might say: “Vert. x could be described as Node.js+ for the JVM.”

But let us view some from the Cholakian post:

One might say that if all Vert.x consists of is Netty+Hazelcast, that it’s nothing revolutionary. The reality is that Vert.x gets the API right, which most of the existing JVM tools get very…. very… wrong. Even simple services in Netty takes large amounts of code, an inordinate of factories, providers, and threadpools must be created just to do simple things. Mixing all this up with languages like jruby is just prohibitively painful. APIs can be as hard to design as implementations are to write!

On top of the API, the other half of the secret sauce is in Vert.x’s leveraging of high performance implementations of Ruby, Javascript, and Groovy. By integrating them into a single Vert.x executable, they’ve given developers the ability to write high-performance code on the JVM without knowing much about the JVM or its ecosystem at all. Vert.x can run any of those languages directly. Furthermore, since Vert.x is just a library, any JVM language can leverage it. On top of that, the entire universe of JVM libraries, concurrency APIs, and tooling is available to developers.

Like all things, your mileage may differ. The blogger notes : This model is great for large numbers of sockets and file descriptors, where it makes the best use of resources. However, it’s very confusing and complicated when it comes to day to day business logic, where simple, blocking, threaded code is a welcome comfort.  Read all about it as Andrew VC goes through the Vert.X/Node.js ropes.

Michael Mahemoff writes: To be effective, Rails cache sweepers need to be more fully understood.  They know no standard, so you must employ art. He goes on: Sweepers observe both your models and your controllers, but most workarounds focus on their controller nature.  Importantly: the sweeper must be explicitly added as an observer. Even more important is redux. Read all about [Rails cache sweeper redux] it.

Node.js employs an event-driven architecture and a non-blocking I/O model, and it provides some blindingly fast performance to some types of data-intensive Web apps. It is about JavaScript on the server side. LinkedIn, Yahoo and eBay are among ardent Node.js users, and none other than Microsoft has discussed end-to-end JavaScript coverage on its Azure cloud. The objective is absolutely fast I/O.

This article features Joyent CTO and co-founder Jason Hoffman, who discusses the roots and reason of node.js. He said:

“Why we did it is, at Joyent we have a lot of servers, more than most companies in the Fortune500 and we write in C, in a compiled language. We needed to write servers in a dynamic language for talking to certain protocols. Basically, we had to write service endpoints. The Node part of Node.js is separate. It is designed so that it can handle a lot endpoints – on the order of a million. Most things written for the [Java Virtual Machine] can only handle 20,000 [endpoints]. Node is meant to handle a lot of I/O. So we took the node part and married that with V8 [the JavaScript virtual machine from Google].”

HP continues to divulge bits and pieces of a road map for the ill-starred and nearly-orphaned webOS. The company has followed up its December plan to release webOS mobile platform and development tools with a proposed timeline, with a full release set before year’s end.  Some people see a life for the associated Enyo JavaScript framework aside from any success or failure webOS ultimately achieves.