Hacker News Reader

Comment by tannhaeuser | Hacker News Reader

> It was only in 2009 that Ryan Dahl, creator of Node.js, made it possible for developers to use the language to write back-end code

Server-side JavaScript was a thing long before that. In fact, Netscape used it as early as 1994 [1], predating Java as a backend language. And CommonJS (on what nodejs' modules and many APIs are based) was a community effort towards a common API by 2000s SSJS implementations (helma, v8cgi/teajs, and others).

Apart from that, a nice read for those who need a WebWorker-like API for CPU-bound nodejs tasks.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server-side_scripting

[2]: http://wiki.commonjs.org/wiki/CommonJS

View on HN

And Rhino[1], which is a Javascript engine written by Netscape in Java, originally for a Java based browser but used quite a bit on the server when that project was killed).

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhino_(JavaScript_engine)

The CommonJS wiki has unfortunately been updated over time to remove some past info (e.g. dead projects), so it doesn't give as good an overview of what once existed as it once did (unless you dig through MediaWiki edits).

Flusspferd—a Spidermonkey-based alternative that was also released in 2009—has quite a nice overview page[0] that's somewhat frozen in time, including "Supported CommonJS Specifications" and "Related projects" sections.

[0] http://flusspferd.github.io/

I was playing with SilkJS at some point. Not sure if it was there earlier than node but the earliest archive is from 2012 https://web.archive.org/web/20120108050201/http://silkjs.org...

Funny now there's zero references to it on the internet. I had really liked it back then. It was fully synchronous and had support for threading. Cool stuff:

https://web.archive.org/web/20130615124030/http://silkjs.net...

Edit: Repository seems to be alive! https://github.com/mschwartz/SilkJS/

There was also Aptana Jaxer around 2008: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aptana#Aptana_Jaxer http://www.jaxer.org/

I wish Aptana had won the race, or at least if not beat Node, competed reasonably with Node.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JScript#JScript

In ~1997 you got a version of JScript (very close to JavaScript) in IIS.

Well JScript was Microsoft's implementation of JavaScript that they were at the time prevented from calling JavaScript IIRC, so I guess I would just say it was JavaScript. Since it was implemented as an ActiveScripting language it meant it could basically be made to work anywhere in Windows.

Yes, those were wiggle words for the pedantic crowd. There are very minor differences/additions that were included in JScript. But almost enough not to be relevant.

> Netscape used it as early as 1994

Sad how neither this, nor xulrunner took off. They simply were ahead of their time. Possibly still are.

I deployed a consumer desktop application on xulrunner (really pre xulrunner) targeting windoze and OS X. I had a Linux version working too. I still from that experience believe html,css,js is the best choice for user facing applications. It was a health app for medical records so in 2004-5 we felt privacy wa s the main reason to not do this as a web app. We still had users that I know of until 2012, if I hadn’t lost the code I’d have open sourced it

Reply on news.ycombinator.com