Most of the stuff is still under production, more details later

Don’t know why but these days I am hooked to Javascript. Perhaps that’s coz I write way too much Javascript these days or maybe the world is really moving to the client side of things. Now I don’t want to go into the details of the holy war of server side vs client side of things. However, I do find that client side stuff is very exciting not to mention that completely open.

For client side development I am using a host of technologies to work my way around. These are BackboneJS, ExpressJS, NodeJS and Redis.

Food For Thought

Now you would be wondering how come so many *JS appended libraries. Man! if I had known myself I would tell but really don’t know what is up with the JS convention anyways.

NodeJS

To me nodejs seems pretty darn powerful when it comes to serving requests. With it’s event driven framework to go around I am sure it’s the language of the server in the times to come. Although I would like to step back and think that Javascript is not really a language but more like a scripting language but I guess the perceptions will change over time. To start a simple node js server all you need is to install Node first. My favorite for doing this is Homebrew

$ brew install node

Here is a sample server.js file which acts as a Node web server.

``` js server.js var http = require(‘http’); http.createServer(function (req, res) { res.writeHead(200, {‘Content-Type’: ‘text/plain’}); res.end(‘Hello World\n’); }).listen(1337, ‘127.0.0.1’); console.log(‘Server running at http://127.0.0.1:1337/');

To run this all you need to do is:

``` bash
$ node server.js

And voila goto localhost:1337 and be greeted by a HTML page response. Cool isn’t it?

ExpressJS

Now we dive into a framework for creating web applications with Node. Why? Coz Frameworks rock and there is a clear well defined design strategy at work which frankly most of us would take a lot of time to devise. So why don’t we use the community’s advice and just do it!

ExpressJS makes the creation of web apps with Node such a breeze.

First you would need to install express. For this we would make use of the Node Package manager (NPM)

$ npm install -g express

This would put a bunch of stuff in the directory of our node app. ExpressJS comes with a cool generator (aka rails style) and one can make use of it to create the next scaffold.

$ express --sessions --css stylus --ejs myapp

So go ahead and start modifying code. Yay! Follow the guide at the ExpressJS Docs

BackboneJS

Server side Javascript is fine but what about client side javascript. For this we have BackboneJS, a client-side MVP (most people call it MVC or MV*) framework which organizes your code into awesome folders called models, views and templates. Find out more about it at the official website.

Redis

And lastly for persistence, I am looking at Redis. I am still looking at it. So i will update this once I have more information about it.