JavaScript Development – A Year Later

As some of you may remember, a year ago I took Q3 off to focus on building a JavaScript application. I learned a lot especially about Node.js.

Yassal and I have a pet project called FeedMe that we have worked on over the years. FeedMe implements a shopping list for us to use when doing our weekly shopping. It has had many shapes over the years; it started out as a plain Java Web application; then it changed to a REST based Scala backend with a plain JavaScript front end to go back to having a Java backend again. Now there is no Java, no Scala…just JavaScript.

The application just seemed to fall into place with Node. If you want a reasonably simple modern web application, Node is perfect. By “modern” I mean a very responsive web application typically with a JavaScript fat client. As it turns out, FeedMe now has a Node backend and a Backbone based JavaScript fat client. If anything, more work went into FeedMe this summer than last, even though there was no sabbatical this time. During the Crisp Hack Summit last weekend, Yassal and I dug deep and we’re getting close to having an actual application.

Although one man’s buzz is the next man’s old news, I think we won the buzzword bingo at the Summit. FeedMe uses the following technologies.

Yassal and I will be blogging about FeedMe and the technologies involved over the next couple of months.

The source (incomplete as it may be) can be found at: https://github.com/crispab/feedme