WURFL in the Cloud with Node.js

I started my professional career as a web programmer. I learned HTML and Perl for CGI scripts while at my last year in college and the only browser was Mosaic. I was excited when Netscape came about and even more so when they introduced some client-side interactivity through LiveScript, soon to be renamed JavaScript (I guess someone in some large company’s marketing department had decided that exploiting the Java wave was a good idea).

JavaScript accompanied me in the first years of my professional career. The fact that I had understood how HTML layers worked on both MSIE 4 and Netscape 4, made me an invaluable resource for my employer. I would wipe out a few hundreds JavaScript lines that Dreamweaver had automatically generated for my colleagues, and replace them with a few lines that exploited ‘eval()‘ to make themselves cross-browser at runtime. Bingo.

Then came WAP, and there was no need for me to look at JavaScript again for some time.

When I decided to look at JavaScript closely again a few years later, quite a few things had changed.

jQuery had delivered a brand new way to look at a page, its events and its DOM. Netscape 4 (and MSIE 4, 5 and 6) were a memory of the past. Apparently, things had changed a lot also on the language side.

I looked at those scripts and, honestly, I could not make sense of them. Way too many things had changed.

Thanks heaven I found a good book that put me back on track (a high-level track, but nevertheless…):

This is a book that I warmly recommend, but brace for things like:

“Because JavaScript is a functional object-oriented language, functions can have methods“

As it turns out, JavaScript has become (maybe it always was, I simply never realized) a very elaborate and powerful language. This, along with the release of an Open-Source JavaScript engine by Google, made it merely a question of time before JavaScript became an attractive (and credible way) way to do server-side development (I will mention JScript on first generation Microsoft ASP only to demonstrate that, at the time, I was there already).

Node.js was born and it is growing progressively popular, as the impressive line of corporate adopters demonstrates.

The ScientiaMobile team can clearly see the value that Node.js delivers and, today, we are proud to announce the addition of a Node.js Cloud Client to the arsenal of tool we offer to our customers.

As usual, the Node.js client can be applied to our free Cloud Offering too. Developers who want to play around with the new Node.js client can register on our site and sign up for free Cloud Usage.

Enjoy

Luca Passani

CTO @ScientiaMobile