nowjs.com is dead. Is the project over?

[Joel Shapiro]

I feel like this might be a stupid question, but is nowJS somewhere besides the old .com?

[Matthew Baggett]

Looks like the site is just down.

- Matthew Baggett

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[Ian Serlin]

I'm not sure if you guys were aware, but Flotype moved on from nowjs to make bridge, but is now no longer making that either. There is no one actively maintaining the official nowjs codebase.

Ian

[Matthew Baggett]

Oh. Oh dear :(

- Matthew Baggett

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[Darshan Shankar]

We've been having some issues with AWS for the past few weeks. Some weird billing issues :-)

It's all taken care of now, so our servers should be back up in the next few minutes. Sorry for the downtime!

Darshan

--
Darshan Shankar

@dshankar - @getbridge

getbridge.com

[RylandAlmanza]

These were amazing projects. Can anyone recommend an alternative to nowjs that is actively maintained? Without anyone maintaining nowjs, it will eventually be incompatible with newer node versions, right?

[Jeff Wilde]

Why did the project die?  Were there issues with the project?  Can someone else take over the project?  

[Nate Morse]

The nowjs paradigm of functions that can be called back and forth from server and client is really inspired.

In my experience, the underlying "socket.io" module is not able to scale well (more than 150 connections was a problem for me), so I had to  retreat from using "nowjs" or more specifically, "socket.io" in one of my applications. On the other hand, I have another application that has been running for 9 months now without any problems, but it only handles 2 to 5 connections at a time. 

My other observation is that: The magic pocket for variable (across sever and client) is not useful, because it does not have any notification events (ie onUpdate, etc.), so you never know when the magic has occurred.

"An opensource project never has to die" -- R. Stallman

--
--Nate

[Ian Serlin]

You might check out shoe (https://github.com/substack/shoe) built on top of sockjs, which is what bridge used on the JS client side. It isn't explicitly an rpc library, it's a streaming library, but like any socket library can sorta be used that way. Bridge is also open-source but requires a running bridge server.

Creating a basic "these are my functions, make them available everywhere" micro-lib could actually be cool. If anyone is interested in doing this together, ping me.

Ian

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Ian Serlin

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[falcon]

I've been trying to connect to the website for the past few days, it is still down.

[Darshan Shankar]

I'm no longer maintaining NowJS. I don't have much time to devote to NowJS as I'm working full-time on another startup. I'm sorry to drop the ball on development and bugs! You might want to look at other projects like dnode which are still being actively developed.

Darshan

[Jeff Wilde]

If I or someone else wanted to take of maintenance of NowJS could we?  Are there issues with NowJS that lead you to abandon it or is it just a time constraint?

[Gabriel Petrovay]

Until an alternate page is availalbe/project taken over by somebody else, etc. you can 
still find the old page in the web archive: http://web.archive.org

For example, a March copy:

http://web.archive.org/web/20110315074114/http://nowjs.com/

Regards,

Gabriel

PS: I am also interested in taking care/part of the alternate project if you need volunteers. (Unless people strongly recommend other projects like substack's dnode or sock).

[Gabriel Petrovay]

Hi Darshan,

Can you pass over the control to the community? I guess there are plenty that you love to take further part into it. The code is not a problem since people can fork the code. I guess the web page is more important because many go through it to learn about NowJS. The twitter account is also another asset that might be interesting to be migrated together with the project.

But please share us some of the reasons about your retreat besides the fact that you are now dragged into the startup you mentioned. Are there non-obvious, hidden, or difficult issues with the project that people should be aware of. Do you recommend that people migrate to other projects (e.g. dnode, sock)? I also understand the scalability issue with socket.io, but probably there are projects where this doesn't matter.

Please share your experience and let's either completely kill it or move it further!

Thanks!

Gabriel

[Gabriel Petrovay]

A more recent copy of the nowJS website:

http://web.archive.org/web/20110714203424/http://nowjs.com/

[John Miller Crawford]

The code's already been forked by James Keane, who's said that he'll maintain it:

https://github.com/jameskeane/now

[Andy Green]

It appears that the fork hasn't been maintained at all in the last 4 months - I wonder if there's a suitable replacement for now.js (which seemed very promising before it was abandoned).

[Andy Green]

What are they doing now if they've abandoned both nowjs and bridge? Is any kind of replacement for nowjs and bridgejs being developed, or is the project entirely defunct now (and lacking a suitable replacement?)

[Nate Morse]

I know that it is not exactly the same but how about dnode and shoe?

[Ian Serlin]

Also pretty different, but you could check out meteor: http://meteor.com/ it is actively developed and venture backed.

Ian

-------

Ian Serlin

i...@ianserlin.com
http://useful.io
http://www.linkedin.com/in/ianserlin

415-754-9563
@spiceninja

[John Tex]

All, please note that the current version of socket.io does not work with nowjs.  I could not get the hello world example to work until I downrev'd to sock...@0.9.17 .

Thanks to scriby who pointed this out in his github commit comment:

scriby added some commits on Jan 26, 2013

			fb9b91d
		Socket.io 1.0 breaks nowjs. Hardcode the version numer.