Introductions thread

[geekfreak]

I think it's useful for folks to introduce themselves.

So My handle is geekfreak, in real life I'm Davey and work for Aptana
as Javascript Architect. primarily developing serverside JS on the
Jaxer platform. You can usually find me hanging out on our Jaxer
forums. Originally from Scotland, now in CA, and wrote my first code
on Punch Cards for a Burroughs 1700. I'm a unashamed JavaScript
fanboy!

I'm really keen to seen API compatible features around File and DB. so
hope this group can maybe help progress that.

so dont be shy. introduce yourself!

[Brian LeRoux]

Hello! I'm Brian. JavaScript junkie and developer at Nitobi Software.
Doing lots of mobile js stuff lately with PhoneGap and XUI. We're
stoked on this initiative too. =)

[Schalk Neethling]

Hi everyone, I'm Schalk a.k.a volume4. I am the curious monkey in here,
checking things out and seeing what I can learn and eventually
contribute. Big JS/jQuery fan and active user of Aptana and now going to
dive into Jaxer.

Run my own consulting business Overt Strategy Consulting and run Open
Source release feed among other sites. Looking forward to joining in on
the discussion.

[geuis...@gmail.com]

Hi everyone, I'm Charles. My background is in front and backend
application development. To say that I'm a javascript junkie is an
understatement. I am coming at the concept of ssjs as an application
stack. I want to have a backend environment that ties in with the
browser very closely. My mantra has become "javascript all the way
down". So far I think a lot of folks are concentrating on the things
that are low in the stack and really important. I hope to be able to
contribute at all levels. I've been working with v8cgi for the last
month and getting that running on Mac OS and interfacing with lighhtpd
via fastcgi.

[Peter Michaux]

Hi All,

I've been working with JavaScript for a few years and have messed
around quite a lot with building a server-side JavaScript framework
using Rhino and Jetty like so many people have done. Before that I was
experimenting with Spidermonkey on the server-side a bit.

I would not call myself a JavaScript fanboy but definitely think it is
the best of the usual group of web scripting languages: Perl, Python,
Ruby, PHP, JavaScript.

I'm certainly interested in seeing if a project-neutral group like
this can have an impact.

Peter
http://peter.michaux.ca/

[Tom Robinson]

(For a second I thought you said you first wrote JavaScript on punch
cards!)

I'm Tom, aka tlrobinson, and I'm a JavaScriptaholic.

I'm a founder of 280 North ( 280slides.com and the Objective-J
language / Cappuccino framework: http://cappuccino.org )

I also recently started the Jack project, a Rack/WSGI-like web server
interface for JavaScript: jackjs.org (mailing list at
http://groups.google.com/group/jack-js and irc at #jack-js on
irc.freenode.org)

[Jan Varwig]

Hi I'm Jan,

I'm currently writing my diploma thesis on Serverside Javascript at
Dortmund Technical University, mentored by Prof. Clemens Cap from
Rostock University.

You guys are my biggest hope and my biggest fear. You could save me
from some unpleasant gruntwork (a workable SSJS implementation) or
preempt my attempts at creating something slightly meaningful (a
lightweight framework that utilizes JavaScripts special features).

I don't have much to report right now, I'm still at the planning stages.
What's on my mind for a technical foundation, roughly, is V8, tied to
a TCP/IP
stack or mongoose, enhanced with MongoDB bindings.

I have a blog at http://jan.varwig.org/ and I'm on twitter going by
@agento

regards

Jan

[Robin Berjon]

Hi all,

I'm Robin, usually as darobin when on IRC. I have a rather long
background as a Perl hacker with a bunch of things on CPAN, and have
been doing some PHP lately (love the symfony framework but the
language still annoys me). I've also done quite a lot of work in W3C
standards, notably working on SVG, CSS, XML, and chairing the Web APIs
group for a while. Naturally, I'm a big fan of Web technology in
general, with a soft spot for Javascript. I have some experience
writing specs and designing APIs that I'd love to put to use here :)

--
Robin Berjon
Robineko (http://robineko.com/)

[Nic Luciano]

Hi-

I'm Nic. My important info is in my signature. I'm one of two developer

To be completely honest I probably won't be contributing to the group much- I haven't touched any sort of server side Javascript, so I joined to hopefully get my feet wet. From lurking today I'm sure it was a good idea. Love Javascript though, jQuery fanboy. Hope to be chiming in in due time.

Cheers!

Nic Luciano
Senior Web Developer @ AdaptiveBlue
http://www.twitter.com/nicluciano

[Nic Luciano]

That sentence was supposed to be "I'm one of two javascript developers for the Glue Firefox extension".

That's first impressions for ya.

Nic Luciano
Senior Web Developer @ AdaptiveBlue
http://www.twitter.com/nicluciano

[Kevin Dangoor]

On Thu, Jan 29, 2009 at 5:28 PM, geekfreak <geek...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I think it's useful for folks to introduce themselves.

I think so, too. Thanks for starting this thread.

I'm Kevin. I've been in software-related sorts of work for 20 years,
in a variety of roles. I've done a fair bit of work in Java,
JavaScript, Perl and a bit of PHP. Oh, and I've used Python on and off
since 1995 and very heavily for the past 4 years. I'm best known as
the founder of the TurboGears web framework.

Last year, I learned a whole bunch of new stuff about client side
JavaScript while working amongst the Dojo guys at SitePen. At the
beginning of this year, I joined the new web developer tools group
within Mozilla Labs. Thus far, I've been largely working on a project
that will be announced soon. I've been doing that server side work in
Python and hope to port it to JavaScript before too long.

I'm quite happy that my role at Mozilla gives me some leeway to help
with this initiative which I think will ultimately help JavaScript
flourish even more.

Kevin

[Dion Almaer]

Hi guys,

I am very happy to know and recognize many of you, and also see some new "faces" that I look forward to getting to know.

I am the co-founder of Ajaxian, and currently have the pleasure of working with Kevin at Mozilla on developer tools. We are very excited at the prospect of bring JavaScript into more than the client, and seeing how it can work well across client and server.

I am jazzed at the activity on the lists today, and I look forward to concrete work being made. I would love to host a ssjs summit at Mozilla to get some time together (for those that can make it, and on irc / phone for others).

Cheers,

Dion

[nlloyds]

Wow, this group blew up quick!

I'm Nathan L Smith.

I currently work for Markup Factory (http://markupfactory.com/) in
Iowa. On most of my day job I work with what is arguably the longest
continually running an most widely deployed SSJS platform: ASP. Once I
figured out you could write JS on there instead of VBScript there was
no chance of turning back.

I'm just really interested in all of the great SSJS related stuff
going on right now, and doing some experimenting with Jaxer,
Persevere, CouchDB, and anything else that looks promising.

My personal site (http://nlsmith.com/) has a version of Prototype.js
that works on server-side environments and a console library.

Can't wait to see the kind of things that can come out of a group of
brilliant insane people like this getting together. :)

[Srdjan Pejic]

Hello,

My name is Srdjan. I work for a "consulting" company on federal government projects in Toronto, Canada. I've been doing programming for near 5 years, mostly web development. Didn't like Javascript originally, but fell in love with it over the last 2 years. I'm currently a Rubiyst, but I'd be more than happy to participate, help out, start, whatever on any project that would involve JS from front-to-back.

I'm already loving the topics on this list.

[Jason Davis]

My name is Jason Davis (jasonkarldavis.com). Although I'm currently
employed as a mathematician, I've been working with Javascript for
about 10 years (and have been a mod at www.codingforums.com for about
as long). It was my first language, and while I've had numerous
affairs with all sorts of exotic (and not-so-exotic) languages, I keep
coming home to it (and it's kept paying my bills too).

It always struck me as odd that web development required knowledge of
about a baker's dozen-worth of languages to do properly, so I'm
excited about seeing a realistic server-side effort. If worse comes to
worse, it's still possible to at least provide JS framework glue like
we do on the client to provide a unified API for the server-side
developer (think ssmootools or ssjquery)...

[Ian Selby]

I'm Ian, and I work with Davey at Aptana. I spend most of my days
doing web development, and most of that time is spent working with
Jaxer. 'Nuff said :)

[Peter Svensson]

Hi Everybody,

My name is Peter Svensson and if all of you in this group were a girl, I'd propose this instant (my wife would be kind of upset, but sometimes you have to prioritize :)

So yes, calling me a JS fanboy is also kind of an understatement. It feels like we've made more contributions and über-critical connections (both between people and subject areas) in the last 24 areas than the last 10 years together. This is going to be so big it's silly. Or maybe I'm understating things again.

Me? I'm just your local firebrand consultant front-end architect based in Sweden (That's Europe, yes). I used to do Java (since 1.0.2) and got tired of using one hand for bashing myself over the head with a trash-can all the time (http://unclescript.blogspot.com/2008/01/end-of-web-frameworks.html). This realization, and others led me to form the Thin Server Architecture Working Group which discuss how to get rid of server-side templating (incidentally all server-side web frameworks) using a SOFEA/TSA approach instead (RIA without Flash, sort of :)

I'm also a Dojo contrib and fanboy, though my contributions has mostly been standing on stages and waving my arms.

Really looking forward to helping out as much as I can, to get this standard done.

Cheers,
PS

http://unclescript.blogspot.com

[Ross Boucher]

Hi.

I'm Ross Boucher, one of the other founders of 280 North (with Tom).
I've also got a lot of code in Objective-J and Cappuccino, and our
product 280 Slides.

I also wrote "Roundabout", which is a "Sinatra" inspired http routing
library that sits on top of Jack. The basic idea is to match HTTP
verbs and URL paths containing simple wildcards to arbitrary blocks of
code. And since it sits on top of Jack, you can actually route entire
Jack applications this way.

We're working on a few other server side JS projects, so hopefully
there will be more to share in the future.

[Ondrej Zara]

Hi,

I'm Ondrej Zara, creator of the (relatively) well-known WWW SQL
Designer (http://code.google.com/p/wwwsqldesigner/). My recent
activities include creating of v8cgi project
(http://code.google.com/p/v8cgi/), which is the primary reason why I
joined this group.

I believe that I have some very strong JavaScript skills as well as
generic programming experience; however, I am not so comfortable with
low-level languages (c, c++). I have a master's degree from
computational mathematics.

I am currently living in Czech Republic, hoping to catch up as many
interesting projects as possible, while there is enough time, courage
and skill ;)



2009/1/30 Ross Boucher <rbou...@gmail.com>:

[Hannes Wallnoefer]

Hi there,

my name is Hannes Wallnöfer, I'm based in Vienna, Austria and have
been working on Helma for the past 10 years or so. Back when I
started, I was mainly a Java guy and didn't really have a love
relation with JavaScript - it was simple enough and worked. Like so
many other people, I've grown more fond of JavaScript as I learned
more about it.

These days, I'm trying to implement everything I learned about server
side JavaScript (and JavaScript as a stand-alone language in general)
in Helma NG:
http://github.com/hns/helma-ng/tree/master - please check it out!

I'm also contributing to the Rhino project whenever I find time.
Looking forward to some interesting discussions in this group!

Hannes

[Breton]

Hi. I'm Breton. I've been using javascript full time for the past..
oh... 3 years I'd say. Longer if you count actionscript. For the past
year, I've been working heavily in Helma.

I don't have any big name projects attached to my name yet, but I have
a little playground at http://zenpsycho.com for little side projects.

[Matt (MPCM)]

Hi, I'm Matt.

I'm involved in the JSON-RPC group. Been using JS in "Ajax" style web
applications since before the term was coined. Long history in BSD
*nix, coding, js/php, 3d modeling, gaming...

I tend to do a lot of R&D and prototypes on my own time, but during
the day I work for a small company producing software for the
insurance industry.

I'm likely to lurk, but I see this as a way to move the language usage
forward. JS on the server makes absolute sense, especially for highly
dynamic and highly complex rule environments.

Domain Specific Structures (instead of Languages, in JSON) go a long
way to solve design problems in a largely language agnostic manner. JS
is an ideal first landing site for such work before enabling it other
languages, putting it on the server makes life that much more fun.

--
Matt (MPCM)

[Malte Ubl]

Hey,

my name is Malte Ubl, based in Hamburg, Germany and working at Sinnerschrader.

I'm the creator of the Joose JavaScript (meta) object system
(http://code.google.com/p/joose-js/) which I'm using at work to
develop both client and server sided applications, plus the stuff in
between.

On more esoteric days I developed as system to run server sided JS on
the client side :)
http://joose-js.blogspot.com/2008/12/massively-parallel-crowd-sourced.html

Cheers
Malte

[Steven Brown]

Hello all,

 

I’m Steven and I’m from the Gold Coast, Queensland, Australia.

 

I have been developing mostly  PHP since 1998 and for the past couple of years I have been developing primarily with Zend Framework.

 

I have developed everything from desktop applications in Delphi and Java, to CD-ROM applications in Director/Lingo and Flash/Actionscript, to websites in Perl, Flash/ActionScript, Red5/Java, PHP and ofcourse JavaScript.

 

I stumbled across a Jaxer introductory video during development of a major AJAX application and really didn’t do anything with it for several months as I was in a period of heavy startup development using PHP/JavaScript/Flash/ActionScript.

 

Once I came up for  air I started playing around with Jaxer. While the benefits are obvious (especially server-side DOM for me) the implementation can be a bit trickier.

 

My frustration with Jaxer’s somewhat limited 1.0 framework (the essentials are all there but the dots have not all been joined yet) have led me to begin development of Jaxo (www.jaxo.org) a Jaxer MVC framework of sorts based on my experience with Zend Framework. Depending on where ActiveJS goes I may leave MVC to ActiveJS and focus more on utility code.

 

Unfortunately I live in a country where programmers are treated like monkeys and there is no respect for programming as something to be mastered. My employer has me on endless deathmarch projects and has implemented several policies against the very programming practices we need apply to deliver quality code in a short period of time. There is certainly no room in the job for trying something like Jaxer so I need to push forward with new technology in my spare time which is limited.

 

I look forward to absorbing knowledge from those of you creating the future of programming and hopefully I can chime in every now and then with something valuable.

 

Cheers,

Steven

[Norris Boyd]

Hi,

I'm Norris Boyd and I'm a creator of Rhino and continue to be involved
in its evolution. Most of my work at Google is not related to Rhino
unfortunately, but I do help out with some of Google's uses of Rhino
on the server side. Over the years all the Rhino contributors have
built a number of features that support server-side development, and
most of the traffic on the Rhino newsgroup (http://groups.google.com/
group/mozilla.dev.tech.js-engine.rhino) comes from people working on
server-side uses of Rhino. I'm interested to see what can come from
this group that can be of help to those users.

Thanks,
Norris

On Jan 30, 8:14 am, Malte Ubl <malte....@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hey,
>
> my name is Malte Ubl, based in Hamburg, Germany and working at Sinnerschrader.
>
> I'm the creator of the Joose JavaScript (meta) object system
> (http://code.google.com/p/joose-js/) which I'm using at work to
> develop both client and server sided applications, plus the stuff in
> between.
>
> On more esoteric days I developed as system to run server sided JS on

> the client side :)http://joose-js.blogspot.com/2008/12/massively-parallel-crowd-sourced...
>
> Cheers
>   Malte

[mvalente]

On Jan 29, 10:28 pm, geekfreak <geekfr...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I think it's useful for folks to introduce themselves.
>

Agreed, here goes (I'll tackle this thread first before going on a
rampage and
mess with the others :-)

Mario Valente here, aka mvalente (except on Gmail where some goddam
Italian
already had the handle; so I'm mfva...@gmail.com).

I'm portuguese (as in Portugal, West Coast of Europe), 40y old and
have been
working with technology for the last 20+ years.

I am a CompSci graduate and also a (recent) MBA.

I have been mostly and entrepreneur (founder and CTO of the 1st
portuguese ISP
back in 1993) and my most recent job post was as CIO for the
portuguese Ministry
of Justice. Anyways, I still consider myself what I originally
started as back in the
1200 baud modems and BBS days: a hacker. I'm not even that good a
programmer
or sysadm guy; I just bang at things until they fit together.

I started programming in BASIC, Z80 and 6502 assembler (Spectrum
and C64
days). During college it was pretty much C and Pascal, although with
much other
stuff like Prolog, LISP, Scheme, Actor, Objective C and other
assorted stuff.

I started web programming in 1993 using Perl and CGI. Eventually,
around 1997,
I migrated to PHP/FI (yes originally it was called that). After a
major project using
it (a local portal) I decided it was enough of mixing code/content/
layout and looked
for a better option. The choice was Python and Zope which I have used
since 1999
and up until recently. I got pissed off with the whole Zope 3.X
mindmelt (I miss 2.x)
and started looking for the next thing in 2005. I got to the
conclusion that that would
be serverside Javascript.

I used to hate Javascript (and I still hate the braces; I have a
preprocessor that
allows me to write without braces using indents like Python) but I'm
slowly getting
used to it :-) If you want to go somewhat into the functional
paradigm, its definitely better
than having to learn Haskell or Erlang :-)

What I have/am looking for is a standard way to write serverside
Javascript, in whatever
interpreter version ( I do prefer Spidermonkey). What I'd like to
have/create (eventually) is
a Zope-like web development framework, written in Javascript. All of
it. Webserver included.

-- MV

[CB Ash]

Hi all,

(stands up)
My name is Chris Ash, I go by "CB Ash" on here and I'm a Javascript-
oholic.
Ok, that feels better to get that off my chest.
(sits down)

I've been working with Javascript since the summer of 1996, fell in
love with it and been working with it and any other web tech I get my
hands on since then. Other than that, I've been working around inside
Java, Perl, Php, a little python, and some actionscript/vbscript since
the mid 90s and VB/C#/.Net/whatever it's calling itself today since it
woke up and stumbled into the light of day. All the server work has
been for doing work on the server level supporting web applications
from data analysis, automatic code/site generation library
development, baeysian pattern algorithms and so on. That was all to
support and help give better foundation to what I was trying to do
client side ... and ... get the given project completed.

Got involved with Dojo in 2005 and started trying to help out best I
could in 2006 with Dojo itself when I can. I've also pushed around
inside jQuery and some light hacking with Google Gears.

I currently work for Mobular Technologies and a creator of their
"Mobular Engine" (a client side database/content management system).
I'm also lending a hand with a startup or two and also do consulting
work as well.

Overall, I've a long time fondness for Javascript, as some one else
here put it very well, I've a soft spot for it.

Be Well,
Chris

[Simon Kaegi]

Hi, I'm Simon Kaegi.

I work for IBM on the Eclipse Equinox project which among other things
provides a java modularity layer known as OSGi. I have a deep interest in
modularity and these days am particularly interested in looking at dynamic
language support in eclipse. JavaScript/Rhino is at the top of the list for
consideration and I'm hoping lessons we learn here are applicable in the
browser as well as server-side environments.

-Simon

[Robert Schultz]

Hello

I'm Robert Schultz. I've been working in JavaScript for a crap long
time now and before that did mostly C work. I truly fell in love with
JavaScript while doing http://worldofsolitaire.com and ever since then
have been wishing I could use it for all the various server side apps
I've had to create to handle various tasks at home and at work.

I'm glad to see so many other people with the same eagerness as I have
for ssjs :)

[Howard Rauscher]

Hi, I'm Howard Rauscher.  I am in charge of front-end development at uship.com.  I spend a lot of time taking apart javascript frameworks and submitting bugs for them. Recently I have been playing around with server side javascript and have been running into some of the issues that are being discussed in this group.  I am excited to be apart of this.

thanks,
Howard

[Jake]

Hi, my name is Jacob Beard. I work professionally as a web front-end
developer in Montreal, Quebec, and I also do academic research for the
McGill University Modeling, Simulation, and Design lab on the
intersection of web-based user interfaces and domain-specific
languages. I use the Dojo toolkit a LOT, both for my academic research
and my job, and I see a lot that can be reused directly on the server,
so I'm hoping to encourage this reuse by discussing things here.

[AptanaPaul]

Hello all. My name is Paul Colton and I am the founder of Aptana. 3
years ago, I had a dream..... ok, I had a craving, to use JavaScript,
CSS, HTML (including the DOM) for both my client AND server-side work.
We started Jaxer then, and it took a long while to get done
(converting Mozilla code to be headless, multi-processed, and server-
side was a challenge), but we did it and and we're super excited about
the results.

Every time I demo to someone some server-side JS, it's still amazing
how simple everything becomes. I look forward to seeing where we all
take this concept.

--Paul

[Uri]

Hi everyone,

I'm Uri Sarid, and I've been doing JavaScript, Ajax, JSON, and such
for about 10 years. Until recently I was the CTO at Aptana, where I
had the pleasure of architecting, leading, and coding much of Jaxer,
with a super team. It's such a pleasure to "take the gloves off" and
really use JavaScript to its full power, create infrastructure that's
"JavaScript-y" and yet addresses server-side concerns such as
persistence, networking, and I/O, and take advantage of having the
same language and DOM capabilities on client and server. I was
thrilled to work with Ryan to start ActiveJS and see how cleanly he's
been building it, and to start working with a few other players in
this area to contemplate standardized APIs and extensible framework
elements. I really feel this could be the beginning of a new web
development paradigm, certainly beyond the work of any single company,
and look forward to contributing further to this. In fact, I would
argue that beyond the need to "catch up" to the maturity of other
development platforms, you can do some things with this platform that
people only dream about in other platforms...

This should be fun!

Uri

On Jan 29, 2:28 pm, geekfreak <geekfr...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I think it's useful for folks to introduce themselves...
>

[Sebastian Deutsch]

Hi,

my name is Sebastian Deutsch. I'm investigating SSJS for almost a year
now - my goal is to unify my frontend/backend/database code and trim
down everything to javascript.
I've created a little experiment site with JsExt http://ruhrstream.9elements.de/
which has it's own little framework (pritty similiar to sinatra).
I also ported JSSpec, a BDD framework to JsEXT (or basically every
SSJS, by providing a generic adapter) - I think SSJS needs platform
independet tests on which everyone has to agree how things should be
done. With that tests we could unify the engines and then... the
better one wins :-)

Cheers

*.sebastian

On Jan 30, 3:07 pm, mvalente <mfvale...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Jan 29, 10:28 pm, geekfreak <geekfr...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > I think it's useful for folks to introduce themselves.
>
>   Agreed, here goes (I'll tackle this thread first before going on a
> rampage and
>  mess with the others :-)
>
>   Mario Valente here, aka mvalente (except on Gmail where some goddam
> Italian

>  already had the handle; so I'm mfvale...@gmail.com).

[Eugene Lazutkin]

I am Eugene. I work for SitePen, and I am a committer of the Dojo
Project. My primary work language and my hobby is JavaScript. I am
interested to see JS in non-browser environments including (web)
servers and desktop applications. I feel that one big thing missing
from JS is the environment-depending standard library, which in turns
prevents us from growing language-wide ecosystems. Hopefully with
serverjs we can get the ecosystem started.

[Kris Zyp]

I work for SitePen as well, and am the lead of the Persevere project
(http://www.persvr.org) and JSON Schema (http://www.json-schema.org)
specification. Persevere is JavaScript server that provides persistence
of JavaScript objects in an object database and exposes JS objects with
REST/HTTP interface and JS method execution through JSON-RPC. Persevere
provides extensive support for persisting and serializing various types
of JavaScript structures including functions, dates, circular/multiple
references, etc. and Comet-style real-time data notifications (of
changes to persistent JS objects). I am certainly hope to further
progress of standard JS APIs by implementing them in Persevere.

I am also a Dojo committer and on the OpenAjax Alliance steering
committee and EcmaScript/TC-39 committee.

Thanks,
Kris

[Patrick Mueller]

I work for Rational in Research Triangle Park, NC, as a member of the
Rational CTO team. I spend a lot of time looking into various web
technologies as part of the day job. Following this effort currently
as a personal interest.

Though I've not been battle-hardened in JavaScript, I have been
playing with it pretty much since it's been available, over 10 years
ago. My Smalltalk colleagues gave me funny looks when I told them
that JS was a pretty nice, little OO language, prototype based like
Self. Of course, back in those days, it was used primarily to scroll
messages along the status bar, and implement popup menus. I wish we
could have been having these discussions back then. :-)

I'm most interested to see how some of the things that fall out of
this effort might be used in all forms of JavaScript enablement,
including better integration with web browsers. But interested in
server-side JS as well.

Patrick Mueller - http://muellerware.org/

[Starr Horne]

Hi everyone,

My name is Starr Horne. I'm a freelance javascript developer
specializing in really high-interactivity browser based applications.
At the moment most of my work is for a pre-launch internet tv startup.

Personally, I don't really care if my API calls are served by a JS,
ruby or python back end.

But there are a few possibilities that really excite me about ssjs:

1) A widely adoped standard library for file, net & DB access would
make it easy for open source alternatives to Adobe Air, etc, to
bloom.
2) I want to do unit testing of my browser based apps on my
development server
3) A standard library of JS code and some way to share it between the
back end and the browser would be heaven.
4) Once JS is a decent multi-purpose language, it would only be a
matter of time before we had JS-QT, JS-GTK, etc... which would be
pretty cool.

Cheers!

[Ycros]

Hi,

I'm Michael Kedzierski, I go around the net as Ycros. I'm from Sydney,
Australia.

I've been using JavaScript for a long time on the browser, and my
favorite client-side JS library is MooTools. My favorite other
programming languages (at the moment!) are Python, Ruby and Haskell. I
am currently doing freelance programming work, and I work primarily in
Python (Django) on the server-side, and MooTools on the client-side.

Using JavaScript everywhere, as a general purpose programming language
has long been a dream of mine.

[Matt Wiseley]

Just stumbled upon this group today, and am glad to have found it. I
own and operate EditMe, a hosted wiki product that has a basic server-
side JavaScript development platform built into it that's based on
Rhino. If you want to toy with building wiki applications (or
applications within a wiki) with JavaScript on the server, check it
out - http://www.editme.com (developer docs: http://wiki.editme.com/development)

I've always thought it odd that there isn't a "real" API for
JavaScript with all the things you'd find in Java/Ruby/Perl/Python/
etc. I'm excited to see what comes out of the impressive group that
has collected here.

Matt

[rektide]

I happen to really really like XHTML and DOM, so naturally my interest
is doing Javascript DOM manipulations on the server side. One day I
dream of being able to load jquery and dojo.dtl on the server side and
rendering away, then push the page to the client. Env.js is doing a
lot of work in this area, http://groups.google.com/group/envjs .

[Bertrand Delacretaz]

Hi,

I'm Bertrand Delacretaz, senior R&D developer at Day Software
(www.day.com). Member and board member of the Apache Software
Foundation, currently involved mostly in the Apache Sling project [0],
a scriptable application layer for JCR content repositories.

I don't write tons of javascript myself but Sling includes a server-
side javascript engine and I'm a firm believer in the "same language
on both sides" model. Before Sling I was active in the Apache Cocoon
project, where I discovered how cool javascript is for server-side
stuff.

-- Bertrand Delacretaz, http://grep.codeconsult.ch
-- twitter:bdelacretaz

[0] http://incubator.apache.org/sling

[David Ascher]

I'm David Ascher.

I work for Mozilla on email and related topics, as CEO of Mozilla Messaging.  I hack on Thunderbird, and have hacked on a cool JS front&back system before my current job @ Mozilla which never got released, alas.  I've been involved with a lot of OSS foundations in various capacities.  I curse and love JavaScript daily.  I was raised a Python guy, but love dynamic languages in general.

I'm hoping that from this project emerge code and conventions that let us speed up JS development even more.

--da

[Mario Valente]

rektide wrote:
> I happen to really really like XHTML and DOM, so naturally my interest
> is doing Javascript DOM manipulations on the server side. One day I
> dream of being able to load jquery and dojo.dtl on the server side and
> rendering away, then push the page to the client.
>

This is wrong in so many ways...

Each time an HTML page is rendered serverside, a cute kitten
dies. On top of that, the MVC pattern is totally fucked up and
the 3-tier architecture is dealt a killing blow.

You want to do that sort of stuff serverside with JS you can
use E4X. HTML belongs on the client and data content should be
pulled from the server by the client, not pushed by the server
to the client embeded in HTML (server pushing to the client data
in JSON is OK though)

-- MV

[Peter Svensson]

I'm trying to find a way to say how much I agree with this, but words fail me :)
I would very much recommend that we start with the basics, and I just deleted the rest of that sentence.

Cheers,
PS

[Davey Waterson]

I find being able to run jQuery/Prototype/Dojo on the server, one of the things
that really makes it usable, as you can dynamically chose where code runs,
without concern for stingified DOM building serverside and nice fast selectorAPI
clientside.

but each to their own i suppose.

[Rey Bango]

Hi everyone. I'm Rey Bango, Add-ons evangelist for Mozilla and Head of Evangelism for the jQuery project. I'm based in Parkland, FL (just north of Ft. Lauderdale).

I'm so impressed with the breadth of talent on this list and I think this group could have tremendous influence over SSJS in the future and I'm looking forward to contributing. I'm anxious to begin writing about what comes out of the group on Ajaxian.com.

Rey...

[mob]

Hi, My name is Michael O'Brien and I'm the chief architect behind
Ejscript and work for Embedthis Software.

I've worked heavily with Javascript in embedded web servers and mobile
applications, most notably in the Appweb embedded web server (http://
www.appwebserver.org). Over the past year I participated in the
ECMAScript Edition 4 group and we implemented most of those
recommendations in Ejscript before the group changed direction.
Ejscript is being used as a web framework in embedded web servers and
also in mobile phones as the basis for a widget application engine.

Happy to be involved.

Michael

On Jan 29, 2:28 pm, geekfreak <geekfr...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I think it's useful for folks to introduce themselves.
>

> So My handle is geekfreak, in real life I'm Davey and work for Aptana
> as Javascript Architect. primarily developing serverside JS on the
> Jaxer platform. You can usually find me hanging out on our Jaxer
> forums. Originally from Scotland, now in CA, and wrote my first code
> on Punch Cards for a Burroughs 1700. I'm a unashamed JavaScript
> fanboy!
>
> I'm really keen to seen API compatible features around File and DB. so
> hope this group can maybe help progress that.
>
> so dont be shy. introduce yourself!

[Benjamin Reesman]

Hi,

I'm Ben Reesman and I work at a company called Intercasting
Corporation in San Diego. We've developed a lightweight server-side JS
framework for internal use but we have every intention of open-
sourcing it if there is interest. Our goal is to use JS as a general-
purpose programming language on the server. The framework is called
Jetstream (no relation to AppJet) and is designed for both writing
scripts and serving HTTP requests. It includes a basic interface to
the servlet API that can be used by itself (like mod_perl) or in
conjunction with the higher-level web framework (which is similar to
Sinatra in its routing and supports closures and continuations as
handlers). It uses Rhino tricks to provide a simple but satisfactory
package system and can import jars containing library code into a
running program.

We've found it to be an extremely productive and enjoyable platform
for server-side development and we'd love to share it with anyone who
is interested. Please email me if
you're interested in trying it out.

Thanks,
Ben

[Wes Garland]

Hi, All;

I'm Wes Garland, I work for PageMail, Inc. We're a company
specializing in messaging products.

I have plenty of UNIX systems programming experience, and have also
spent a lot of time learning how to work with Mozilla Spidermonkey
internals.

Part of my current day job involves producing a usable SSJS
environment/ecosystem to use internally.

This looks like an interesting group; I wish it had existed when I
started on this project (2007).

Wes

[Dipankar Sarkar]

Wow, all kinds of cool people and with experience far more than mine.
So i would categorize myself as a n00b who loves the internet and what
can be done with the kind of social connectivity it allows. I started
off with PHP, then rails and now python (django, web.py). Have been
looking at javascript for a long time, played around with ssjs.
Looking forward to helping this become mainstream.

Dipankar
Kwippy, http://kwippy.com
Blog : http://desinerd.com
Site : http://dipankar.name

[niczar]

On Jan 29, 11:28 pm, geekfreak <geekfr...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I think it's useful for folks to introduce themselves.

I've worked for over two years on a large, complex XulRunner app.
Currently working as a sysadmin, mostly hacking Perl, but I'd love to
be able to use JS for some things, for instance to create simple Web
front-ends to common admin tasks.

[Nick Campbell]

Hi,

My name is Nick, you can often find me as ncampbell or ncb000gt in
message areas. I'm one of a few at Axiom Software and am involved with
all of our products including Axiom Stack (http://
www.axiomstack.com/).

This is good stuff. I'm excited to see activity in the area of SSJS
and standardization. As per the message of this group, right now
libraries, apps and API are too scattered. Also, people see JS as
"ugly" and only as a client side framework. The challenges facing this
group are not only technical, but social.

I'm eager to help in any way that I can.

- Nick Campbell
Axiom Software, Inc.
Director, Product Development

On Jan 29, 5:28 pm, geekfreak <geekfr...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I think it's useful for folks to introduce themselves.
>

[Robert Thurnher]

On Jan 29, 11:28 pm, geekfreak <geekfr...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I think it's useful for folks to introduce themselves.

I'm Robert Thurnher and have primarily plus extensively been
developing rather complex AJAXy SSJS Web apps based on Helma,
Prototype JS and script.aculo.us (e.g., blogr.com) at Knallgrau
(www.knallgrau.at), Vienna, Austria, during the last couple of years
or so.
Previously, I've finished my bachelor's and done programming with a
primary focus on Java (mainly thru university) and Python (initially
got in contact with it thru a student job at Siemens PSE, Vienna) plus
a fair bit of Perl and Ruby/Rails (mainly some Web site projects,
e.g., for Berlin-based politik-digital.de).
Currently, I'm mainly concentrating on pursuing my CS master's at
Vienna University of Technology (i.e., doing quite some Java again
now) and basically very fond of all things Web development.
Lately, I've become pretty fascinated by Groovy and Grails, BTW.
Nevertheless, I also still like JavaScript resp. ECMAScript very much
(without being ashamed of that ;-) ) and hope it will develop,
flourish and mature further, on the server as well.

IMHO, this initiative turns out to be very interesting/promising and
will hopefully have some impact for which I'd like to contribute as
far as I can, too.

On the Intertubes I'm generally known as robi42.

[Paul Querna]

On Jan 29, 2:28 pm, geekfreak <geekfr...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I think it's useful for folks to introduce themselves.

Hi, I'm Paul Querna.

I'm an Apache HTTP Server developer, ASF member, and recently wrote
mod_v8.

I'm mostly interesting in standardizing the HTTP Interface for SSJS,
wither its jack-js or something else, I don't care too much, I just
want something standardized before I invest too much time into
mod_v8 :)

Thanks,

-Paul

[Wes Garland]

Hey, Paul.

Have you considered exposing server, request, etc, inside apache to JS?  I've been considering *that* for a while, to allow writing Apache modules in JS, like mod_perl.

Just throwin' out ideas. :)

Wes

--
Wesley W. Garland
Director, Product Development
PageMail, Inc.
+1 613 542 2787 x 102

[Paul Querna]

On Tue, Feb 3, 2009 at 6:06 AM, Wes Garland <w...@page.ca> wrote:
> On Tue, Feb 3, 2009 at 2:06 AM, Paul Querna <paul....@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> On Jan 29, 2:28 pm, geekfreak <geekfr...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> > I think it's useful for folks to introduce themselves.
>>
>> Hi, I'm Paul Querna.
>>
>> I'm an Apache HTTP Server developer, ASF member, and recently wrote
>> mod_v8.
>>
>> I'm mostly interesting in standardizing the HTTP Interface for SSJS,
>> wither its jack-js or something else, I don't care too much, I just
>> want something standardized before I invest too much time into
>> mod_v8 :)
>>
>
> Hey, Paul.
>
> Have you considered exposing server, request, etc, inside apache to JS?
> I've been considering *that* for a while, to allow writing Apache modules in
> JS, like mod_perl.
>
> Just throwin' out ideas. :)

Yes, but really I would rather have the equivalent to WSGI for python in SSJS.

There have been lots of one off SSJS servers, many around for years,
but they all have incompatible interfaces, meaning applications are
stuck to them, and part of the reason no one true framework has
emerged, because they are always tied to one server side VM and server
application implementation.

[sodapop]

Hi everone,
my name is delisa I wish to make new friends!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

On Jan 29, 4:28 pm, geekfreak <geekfr...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I think it's useful for folks to introduce themselves.
>

[RoCer]

Hi,

I am Robert Cerny, a freelance software developer currently living in
Austria. I was introduced to the qualities of JavaScript by the
writings of Douglas Crockford. I am the developer of Cerny.js [1]
which provides method call interception, runtime type checking,
programming by contract and some other rather obscure features for
JavaScript. But this is not why i am here :) I am also the creator of
Topincs [2], which is a semantic Wiki based on Topic Maps. Here is how
it looks like:

http://www.topincs.com/computers/programming/javascript/wiki/

Topincs has a request processing layer which is implemented in PHP. I
am looking to implement/replace that layer in a different language.
JavaScript would be my first choice. This is why i am here :)

Kind regards,

Robert

[1] http://www.cerny-online.com/cerny.js/
[2] http://www.cerny-online.com/topincs/

[Steve Walker]

Hi

I'm Steve Walker and I guess I'm a relative newbie when it comes to
JavaScript.

I've been developing web applications since 2001 using mainly ASP.NET
and PHP. For most of that time I was very pro-server-side regarding
the browser as little more than a viewer for content generated on the
server. Around mid-2007 a colleague showed me Adobe Flex and coupled
with my growing frustration with form-based applications I decided
RIAs were the future of web development. Being a fan of web standards
I didn't like the idea of using proprietary technologies so Ajax was
the obvious route to take. But Ajax meant JavaScript and learning
JavaScript wasn't something I particularly wanted to do. Anyway, you
all know the end of this story, I discoved the power and flexibility
of JavaScript and was immediately hooked.

Although I've learned a lot of front-end techniques since then I guess
my heart is still on the server and I'm particularly interested in not
just server-side JavaScript
but JavaScript as a general purpose programming language like Python
or Ruby. Last year I put together Torino, a Rhino-based JavaScript
environment, to
give me a platform on which to explore this. My goal was to start to
develop the kind of server-side APIs we already see in the Java
and .NET framework libraries.

It's great to say so many people thinking along the same lines and I
look forward to learning from and hopefully contributing something to
the discussions taking place here.

Some of you may know me from Team Aptana, where I help provide
community support for Aptana Studio and Jaxer.

Steve

http://torino.sourceforge.net.

[Stefan Weiss]

Hi.

My name is Stefan Weiss; I'm a freelance software developer based in
Vienna, Austria. I've been working with various scripting languages
for the last 12 years, in a number of open source and proprietary
projects. It's very exciting to see server-side JavaScript development
gaining some speed at last. JavaScript is a beautiful language... all
it needs now is a beautiful server-side environment.

I'm looking forward to contributing to this project.

cheers,
stefan

[Kris Kowal]

Hi, I'm Kris Kowal. I'm a Software Engineer currently at a Caltech
startup called FastSoft in Pasadena, CA US/A, by way of Apple and Cal
Poly, SLO. By day I write a web interface for an WAN TCP acceleration
appliance with Django, Python, and the usual suspects. By night I
write a Comet/JSON MUD game called Tale with a Twisted/Python backend
and all sorts of cool stuff. For Tale, I wrote a JavaScript module
loader http://modulesjs.com, ported Pythonic types and idioms to
JavaScript, and integrated about 100 modules. The collection is
called Chiron http://chironjs.googlecode.com, and it's my hope that we
can make JavaScripts interoperable, for real.

[Cameron McCormack]

Hello!

geekfreak:

> I think it's useful for folks to introduce themselves.

I'm Cameron McCormack, a PhD student in Australia working on diagram
authoring and layout. I write a bunch of JavaScript for my current
project (a diagram authoring tool written on top of Apache Batik[1], a
Java SVG toolkit, which uses Rhino). I'm a committer on the Batik
project, co-chair of the W3C SVG Working Group, and editor of Web
IDL[2], a spec intended, among other things, to get the intricacies of
JavaScript environments in browsers standardised. One issue I hope to
tackle soon for Web IDL is how sequence<> types are exposed to script,
and whether a ByteArray (or similar) type/interface needs to be defined.

Plus, I'd love to rewrite my server side scripts in JavaScript. :)

[1] http://xmlgraphics.apache.org/batik/
[2] http://www.w3.org/TR/WebIDL/

--
Cameron McCormack ≝ http://mcc.id.au/

[mde]

Howdy, I'm Matthew Eerrnisse. I'm a Web developer, and have been
working with JavaScript-heavy UIs for a pretty long time. I wrote an
early article on Ajax for O'Reilly Network, and a book on Ajax
Development for SitePoint.

I work now for Seesmic, building their Web application. I use mostly
Ruby on the server, but I would love to be using JavaScript instead.
It's really exciting to see this work going on -- I'll be following it
with great interest, and will help out in any way I can.


Matthew
http://fleegix.org/

[Jan Lehnardt]

Hi,

On Jan 29, 11:28 pm, geekfreak <geekfr...@gmail.com> wrote:

> I think it's useful for folks to introduce themselves.

my name is Jan Lehnardt. I work on Apache CouchDB*, an open source,
document based database that uses JavaScript to define Map/Reduce
functions for creating data indexes. I live in Berlin, Germany.

* http://couchdb.org/

Cheers
Jan
--

[Ates]

Hi all,

I'm Ates (pronounced: uh-tesh) and I'm currently doing UI work (with a
lot of JavaScript) at Genesys Telecommunication Labs (an Alcatel-
Lucent company) in Toronto.

I'm truly a JavaScript fan and in my spare time I like to indulge in
experiments such as:

http://magnetiq.com/a-boulder-dash-clone-in-only-20-lines-of-javascript/
http://magnetiq.com/subpixel-scrolltext-in-javascript/
http://magnetiq.com/rendering-n-sided-polygons-with-dhtml/

I've also recently embarked on a new open-source project: jsUnity
(http://jsunity.com), which is a lightweight, context-agnostic testing
framework for JavaScript. This is precisely what initially lead me to
this group: I was looking for working SSJS implementations that I
could test jsUnity against.

This group piqued my interest for two main reason:
1. JavaScript. Period.
2. Server-side. I have quite a bit of server-side experience, be it
using technologies like ASP, PHP, JSP, .NET, ISAPI or writing my own
HTTP servers from scratch (using Delphi or C++).

Ates - http://magnetiq.com