Joyent Smart Platform

[Brad]

From a bird's eye perspective can anyone comment on the possible
synergy (or lack thereof) between Flapjax and the Joyent Smart
Platform: http://www.joyent.com/products/joyent-smart-platform/

[Shriram Krishnamurthi]

It's frankly somewhat hard for me to tell exactly what this is -- high
on buzzwords, low on concrete technical content. But it looks like
their focus is primarily on cloud-hosted services, right?

Shriram

[Arjun Guha]

I usually remove this sort of junk. But, we got a lot this past week.

Arjun

[Shriram Krishnamurthi]

Arjun, I think you're confusing things. This is a genuine question.
It's unfortunate that it showed up in a week when a bunch of spammers
figured out how to penetrate Google Groups. Follow the link to
Joyent.

Shriram

[Brad Jones]

I found this to be a little more informative -
http://ajaxian.com/archives/joyent-smart-platform-auto-scaling-server-side-j
s . It certainly is server-side and cloud-hosted. Just watched this video
presentation by the architect - http://jsconf.blip.tv/

Brad

[Arjun Guha]

Looking at

http://becoming.smart.joyent.com/day_one.html

It does server-side JS, which is fine. But, as far as I can tell, it
doesn't integrate with JavaScript on the client in any way. So, you
could use it with Flapjax, just as their tutorial uses it with jQuery.

Arjun

On Sep 17, 3:19 pm, "Brad Jones" <pjones0...@rogers.com> wrote:
> I found this to be a little more informative -http://ajaxian.com/archives/joyent-smart-platform-auto-scaling-server...

> s . It certainly is server-side and cloud-hosted. Just watched this video

> presentation by the architect -http://jsconf.blip.tv/

[Shriram Krishnamurthi]

> Just watched this video
> presentation by the architect - http://jsconf.blip.tv/

Fyi, direct link:

http://jsconf.blip.tv/file/2386711/

Shriram

[Leo Meyerovich]

They are interested in the code that runs in the server and propose applications contain  1) client and server JavaScript code and 2) calls to their server APIs. The proposal to clean up server code by introducing a JavaScript layer is a common theme  (wiki server js); they seem to have a PHP-like templating language to generate pages with interleaved JS.  We initially provided an even simpler model: 1) client JavaScript code and 2) a cloud storage webservice for persistence. Due to favorable trends, we no longer need to be the ones to provide 2), which is a confidence win for everyone involved.

Experiments in how to specify server computation are interesting -- as Flapjax helps with concurrency, it's conceivable that our abstractions have a use. Performance and scale introduce new concerns in this domain which would need to be examined. Largely unexplored is the potential for mixing client and application code; if both are already in JavaScript, migrating or sharing objects seems natural at a technical level (even though it actually isn't for the general case).

- Leo

[Leo Meyerovich]

By "client and application code" I meant "client and server code" :)

- Leo

[Shriram Krishnamurthi]

Hi Brad --

I spent a while reading through this. Then I sat down to compose a
response, and found that Leo had said everything I wanted to say!

There seems to be growing buzz on Flapjax on the server side. I know
of at least one other company, 10gen [*], who has talked about doing
this and doing so successfully. I am not convinced about the appeal
in this. The reason JavaScript is interesting is not because it's a
great language (it's not awful but it's not great either -- it's just
odd) but because it's on the browsers.

Plus, and I may sound a bit jaded here having been around the dynamic
language compilation block a few too many times, no matter how clever
your run-time system, you're not really going to get the best
performance out of a fully dynamic language. Now if only we had a
Typed version of JavaScript instead....

Shriram

[Brad Jones]

Thanks goes to both you and Leo for taking the time and reviewing this, much
appreciated. I look forward to exploring Flapjax further.

-- Brad

[Shriram Krishnamurthi]

In re-reading my reply, I realize I didn't explain the *:

> There seems to be growing buzz on Flapjax on the server side.  I know
> of at least one other company, 10gen [*], who has talked about doing
> this and doing so successfully.

What I meant to say is that a former student (Eliot Horowitz) is one
of the head technical honchos of 10gen, so I wanted the disclaimer
clear alongside what might have looked like a plug.

Thanks for the pointer, Brad, and welcome!

Shriram