• Creating a Blog I'll Actually Use

    02-24-2010 4:41 AM

    I have 3 blogs including this one.  And they're all being neglected.  The last post on any of them was 5 months ago.  There are lots of reasons why I don't write more.  Busy at work, social life, good old-fashioned laziness.  But there's only one that activates my programmer's itch.  My blog interface is just not user-friendly enough.

    When I do get the urge to write, nothing derails it faster than getting irritated with the actual writing process.  Getting your thoughts onto paper should be the easy part.  The hard part is ensuring that those thoughts don't make you look like and idiot.

    So this blog post serves 2 purposes.

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  • Supporting the ServerJS Standard On Axiom Stack: First Steps

    08-02-2009 9:06 PM

    I've been following the ServerJS list on google groups for a while.  I'm excited about the emergence of javascript as a full-fledged modern language.   But it's sorely lacking in a lot of functionality we've come to take for granted in programming languages.  The ServerJS group has taken on the task of developing standard APIs and libraries to enable things like file system access, networking capabilities (although this is partially addressed by XMLHttpRequest) and a sensible, secure module system for pulling everything together.

    There are several usable implementations of the early ServerJS standard available right now.  So I sat down this weekend to see if I could integrate one of them into Axiom Stack (the open source server-side javascript framework that powers this site.)  I chose Narwhal simply because the primary maintainer, Tom Robinson, is focusing on support for the Rhino JavaScript Engine.  Getting things up and running ended up being pretty straight forward, so I figured I'd outline things here.

    On the surface Narwhal, and any other ServerJS compatible implementation, is just a library of javascript files that provide the standard APIs.  The underlying implementation relies on java packages though, which is why the Rhino engine is key.  Narwhal includes Rhino as a dependency and it also includes scripts for bootstraping the javascript environment in a JVM and loading the necessary js files.

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