In his JavaScript as a Language blog post, John Resig writes that Javascript is ready for its next phase, breaking out from its traditional habitat inside the web browser. In this regard, he thinks two projects have really stood out as having a lot of potential. Rhino on Rails and Helma.
John says about Helma: "This web application framework is a long standing stalwart of server-side development with JavaScript (again, using Rhino). Surprisingly, its managed to fall through the cracks with just about every JavaScript developer that I know. I recently noticed it, and after some startup friends of mine revealed that theyre developing an application based on it, I became convinced that well be hearing about this little framework in the upcoming months."
Of course, Javascript has been used on the server-side in many products ever since Netscape used it in its server-side offerings. What makes Helma special, is that it is for "Javascript as a Language" what Django is for Python and what Rails is for Ruby. In fact, Helma probably was the first Rails-ish web framework, offering an agil development approach and code-less mapping of objects to database tables, long before there even was such a thing as Rails.
At the time of Helma's first release the problem was that Javascript was deep in its dark age. Hardly anybody took Javascript seriously as a language. In 2001, the manifestos for a Javascript enlightenment were already in place, though. David Flanagan released the fourth edition of his Rhino book, which cleanly separated the core Javascript language from the client-side Javascript and Douglas Crockford wrote his now famous "Javascript: The World's Most Misunderstood Programming Language" web page, but not many noticed.
Back then, I thought that Javascript was so much stuck in browser-centric preconceptions that we could never redefine what "Javascript" was perceived as and that we should switch to using the language's original project name "Mocha" when talking about it outside the web browser. Later, the Ajax hype came along and proved that it is possible to redefine the way the language is perceived. Generally, Javascript is still seen as a client-side language, but I think we know now that this can change quickly :-)
4.7.2007, 10:13