Totally JavaScript Web Stack - Middleware, Webserver, DB suggestions?

Question

Hi Everyone

I'm currently looking for a new web stack to build a hobby project on and would like it to be powered by JavaScript. I've had a quick look at Nitro, NarwhalJS etc. but was wondering if anyone had any solid recommendations or experience of an entire end-to-end javascript/json architecture ( jquery, middleware, standard libraries, db etc.) that they could share.

I'd prefer it to be a stack that you think is going to grow and is actively being looked after, documentation, community of nice like-minded individuals etc.

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Caveat: This answer somewhat fails to meet your basic requirement of personal experience with the resources listed. :-)

Off-the-cuff, there's Jaxer from Aptana and Chrome Server (which, despite the name, isn't related to Google Chrome AFAIK). Speaking of Chrome, though, there's an Apache CGI module that supports server-side scripting using JavaScript via Google's V8 engine, but that doesn't help you much with DB connectivity and such.

I'll also plug Java and Rhino, which I have used a bit. Via Rhino, you can compile JavaScript into Java bytecode (which, if you're using the Sun runtime, is JIT-compiled to machine code by Hotspot). That means you can run JavaScript in any servlet container (Tomcat, Resin, etc.). The joy here is that all of the huge array of goodies available for Java is instantly available to you via JavaScript -- so, MySQL connectors, image manipulation libraries, just about anything you can imagine. It's also amazingly easy to access those resources from JavaScript via Rhino. To give you an idea:

importPackage(java.io);
var f = new FileWriter("test.txt");
f.write("Testing 1 2 3");
f.close();

...and we've just written a file on the server via JavaScript, using Java's java.io.FileWriter class. You can also execute dynamic scripts at runtime via the javax.script package, which (for JavaScript) uses Rhino under the covers, although I'm not immediately coming up with a use case for doing that. :-)

Answer 2

For the database part of the stack:

Couchdb uses JSON and REST to store data in a document format. It uses PUT,DELETE for storage - I'm not sure how that would work with Javascript.

Answer 3

I'm building a new service called PageForest that helps developers write totally client-side javascript programs, with PageForest providing storage and user management. Here's a sample page:

http://pfsamples.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/SAMTable/index.html#mckoss%5F16

This is still a work in progress, but I'd love to get some feedback on the approach. You can find more samples at the pfsamples.googlecode.com site.

Answer 4

Check out JScript / Windows Scripting Host(wsh) and possibly HTA's. HTA's can actually be served via a webserver and act as a locally running application with extended rights. If you want pure web development you can use WSH and some IIS tweaking to process server requests on the back end with pure javascript code in a WSF file. WSH also provides access to the file system, ODBC compliant databases and a slew of other COM exposed applications via the ActiveX model. We're not talking blazing speed, but you're programming in javascript to begin with.

Here are some links on the "stack"

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms536496%28VS.85%29.aspx

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/15x4407c%28VS.85%29.aspx

Answer 5

Helma should work well as a web server layer. It streamlines the use of Rhino as the web tier logic language.

Answer 6

How about using

GWT-Spring-Hibernate-MYSql