Interactiveness in web applications requires real-time performance on the server side. However, these event oriented applications have been very difficult to write. Developers could write them in C, C++, twisted or other environments—but the effort is brutal, according to Bryan Cantrill. Enter node.js, referred to as "node" in the talk.
Node.js is a framework for server-side javascript for event driven/oriented applications. Cantrill says "node" is a beautiful confluence with the asynchronous power of javascript, coupled with a terrific engine in V8, and then mated to the Unix APIs—and he says it's greater than the sum of its parts.
Realtime event driven web applications are getting built with "node." Examples are implementation detail for the orchestration software to stand up a cloud, as well as other real-time interaction applications, such as an application (in beta at the time) for sharing to-do lists with real-time updates and voice chat. Node.js helps make possible the realtime web.
Cantrill recounted how a friend of his, who was a dedicated veteran programmer of C-based event driven apps, endeavored to replace a 10,000 line C program with a 4,000 line node.js program—his programmer friend then rolled it into production and "his bit totally flipped" about node.js. This typifies the "node" community, says Cantrill. He closed with: "Don't listen to the hype ... just code, baby!" Hear in this talk further how Cantrill envisions "node" as a means of producing higher performing artifacts.
Bryan Cantrill is VP of Engineering at Joyent. Previously a Distinguished Engineer at Sun Microsystems, Bryan has spent over a decade working on system software, from the guts of the kernel to client-code on the browser and much in between. Bryan led the team that designed and implemented DTrace, a facility for dynamic instrumentation of production systems that won the Wall Street Journal’s top Technology Innovation Award in 2006 and the USENIX Software Tools User Group Award in 2008. Bryan co-founded the Fishworks group at Sun, where he designed and implemented the DTrace-based analytics facility found in the Sun Storage 7000 series of appliances — a facility that InfoWorld described as “stunning” in a February 2009 review. In 2005, Bryan was named by MIT’s Technology Review as one of the top thirty-five technologists under the age of thirty-five, and by InfoWorld as one of their Innovators of the Year. Bryan received the ScB magna cum laude with honors in Computer Science from Brown University.
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