Had been to the wonderful JavaScript conference JSFoo last week. The tremendous enthusiasm in the web development community for server side JavaScript was all at display. Personally, I have spent a lot of time coding visualizations with JavaScript. However only recently did I write some tidbits of code with NodeJS. And I hadn't spent any time properly studying it. The conference has spurred me to do better. I started reading NodeJS and working on a small project to create my first non-trivial NodeJS application (which I shall share in this blog). But those details are for a little later… let me start with JSFoo…
Most web applications have the well-known 3-tiered structure - WebTier > ApplicationTier > DataTier. Both WebTier and ApplicationTier have the web-layer to parse the incoming HTTP requests. Its in the WebTier that one deploy's load-balancing L4-routers like Apache/Nginx or Netscaler like appliances. HTTP requests are forwarded by the WebTier to the ApplicationTier which is generally served by a much bigger farm of servers. Web-layer in the ApplicationTier is the focus of this blog. Its a challenging area of software development for the following reasons and more -
Graph depictions are common for problems like computer networks, social networks etc. Sometime ago, I came across the use-case of graphs for software application topologies. This post covers the few things I discovered on the topic of application topologies and their graphical representation.
I have been a Dojo user for many years now. Also use many JavaScript libraries (jQuery, backbone, bootstrap, D3, highsoft) all the while but Dojo is what I really love. I would not embark on any "professional" development work without being armed with Dojo. But I rest my opinions and comparisons of different JS libraries for a different blog. Here the context is to "build" Dojo. After all every professional project should do a build of their JS - compilers like Google Closure can find bugs, obfuscate and eventually make execution faster.