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What was the reason for using Javascript to do the server-side rendering (as opposed to another language on the server)? Was it just a preference, or were there some technical reasons?

There were reasons for wanting to use an embedded scripting language in general. Ultimately the choice (at the time) came down to either Lua or JavaScript. There were pros/cons to each approach and in the end JavaScript was chosen mainly because many coming in from the outside would already be familiar with it. Keep in mind that this was before Chrome existed and browser wars had not begun yet... so things were a bit rocky at first, but really it's peen proven to be the right path. Eich's common line -- "Always bet on JS" and all :)

Yes, the Bloomberg Terminal app is basically an Electron app, but built with Bloomberg's equivalent of Electron.

Bloomberg is one of the biggest users of JavaScript in the world, many millions line of code, but most of it used in a desktop app.

The Bloomberg terminal is totally different from Electron apps. For a start, it's all rendered server side, as the parent comment explained.

It depends on what you mean by "rendered". The client side is a highly modified Chromium which runs a GTK like GUI implemented in JavaScript.

https://github.com/bloomberg/chromium.bb

So it is like Electron in that you are literally interacting with a web-browser, but one made too look like a desktop app.

I’d love to re-read that ancient white paper called ‘Bloomberg in a nutshell’ if anyone has it. It explains the server side architecture which is pretty interesting and terrifying as you said.

i'd love to read more about how Bloomberg Launchpad was implemented [0]. that seemed like a HUGE departure from the clunky old bloomberg interface. it had all the visualizations you want, excellent snap to grid, and was live updating everything. just amazing for its time.

[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/professional/product/launchpad/

It's implemented in the same manner as the traditional "panels" (how we refer to the non-Launchpad windows). It's the same code, same implementation, same development environment. Everything's integrated. When it started out (~17 years ago) it was different and new, but the work there was taken back into the main panels to replace what you think of as old 80x25 screens. All of it is now rendered using Chromium (Blink).

thats fascinating. it looks and feels so different from the main panels. once i had launch pad i was like "i never wanna go back to the main panels again" lol. (of course, i couldnt, cos some functionality was missing plus it just felt good punching weird keywords i already memorized)

might be a dumb question, but how do you render frontend server side? Is the content of the UI dynamically generated in the backend and serve as a static page to users?

The UI library is also GTK, or at least GTK of a bygone era.

That's so interesting! Thx for sharing this.

> designed heavily with latency in mind

> The front-end is fully rendered server side (meaning every click requires a full round trip to Bloombergs servers)

O_o

Ok ok I guess that’s not the area where they care about low latency?

Or they care about latency so much because they need to keep full page load latency as low as possible?