Tag: ASP

NodeJS – radical advance uses JavaScript on the Server!

2013-May-21

I have heard a couple people in the past several weeks comment on how novel or noteworthy NodeJS is, for allowing devs to employ their beloved JavaScript language on the server!! Can you believe that? How awesome is it that we can write JavaScript on the server?!

Uh, folks, I’m here to tell ya, that ain’t new or novel.

By my reckoning, the first company to support JavaScript on the server side was named Netscape, and around 1995 or 96, they released Netscape Live Server, or something like that, which had a JavaScript programming model for web servers. Brendan Eich invented JavaScript in a rush-rush job, 10 days in May, 1995, for use in the Netscape browser. But Netscape also released a server platform that they tried to monetize, and it had a JavaScript-powered extension mechanism.

Not long after that, Microsoft released the NT Option Pack. I think this was in mid-1996. The Option Pack was a free add-on for Windows NT 4.0. An “out of band release”, they called it then. The NTOP included the first edition of ASP, what we now call “ASP Classic”, which allowed developers to use VBScript or JavaScript (Microsoft called it JScript then) to dynamically generate web content. (See The ABCs of Active Server Pages from 1997, content still on MSDN!).

ASP later became part of Windows NT, and in subsequent service packs and in Windows 2000, IIS + ASP was just “in there”. Prior to the NTOP, Windows NT 4.0 included IIS, but IIS was just a static web page server and CGI server. (I think). ASP was something a little different. By the way, ASP is still supported in IIS, yea verily, after yea these many years, 17 years by my count. So… to all those poeple who claim that Microsoft doesn’t support technologies long enough, ASP is counterexample #1.

Yes, I am not making this up: today you can install Windows Server 2008 or whatever the latest server is, enable ASP, and then deploy your JavaScript ASP code and begin serving web apps with it. It just works.

Classic ASP works for any type of content – so you can serve HTML markup of course, but also XML, or CSS (dynamically generated CSS? Maybe…) and of course client-side Javascript. This would be server-side Javascript potentially dynamically generating then emitting client-side JavaScript and yes, it is possible. Dynamic images, plaintext, of course any mime type, any content. What about REST APIs? Yes, you can use Classic ASP and JavaScript running on a Windows Server to implement a REST API, which is a use-case that is very common for NodeJS these days. Classic ASP can do content negotiation, can inspect and set cookies, can do anything a web platform can do. This also just works.

In practice, “Classic ASP” code often resembles what I will call “Rubbish PHP” code, which is to say, it mixes markup with code, willynilly, there’s poor templating, poor code re-use, poor use of classes and generally things are just an unmaintainable mess. But that is by no means required by either Classic ASP or PHP. That is just an unpleasant side effect of being really easy to use, which means novice programmers use it. Both Classic ASP and PHP have that quality. It is possible to author nicely architected ASP code, and PHP code.

Nicely architected? If I may be so bold, here’s an example.

In any case, NodeJS is by no means the first JavaScript-on-the-server runtime environment.

One thing that makes NodeJS different is asynchrony. Classic ASP did not support asynchrony very well.

On the other hand, NodeJS claims to be “super fast” or whatever. And from my point of view, Classic ASP running JavaScript was pretty fast dating back to 2002. Even in Windows 2000 Server, the Script host compiled the JavaScript and cached the compilation unit, so the first time you ran a page you’d incur the compile cost but thereafter all other requests executed the pre-compiled cached result. Which meant much better performance. And starting with Windows Server 2003, you could use the kernel-level cache in Windows Server, and lots of other nifty features. ASP really performed quite well. The performance of ASPNET on similar workloads is measurably better, but not by orders of magnitude. I would bet that Classic ASP with JavaScript gives NodeJS a run for its money on performance, even today.

As far as I know, Classic ASP has not been enhanced to use the new Chakra JavaScript engine. Chakra was built for IE9, the v8 competitor, and is significantly faster than the older Microsoft Script Host, about twice the throughput in the workloads I tested. I suppose that Microsoft did not see a customer benefit for using Chakra under Classic ASP. Classic ASP people aren’t clamoring for more performance out of their Classic ASP apps; at this point, they just want stability.

Another thing that sets NodeJS apart now, is the active community and the sharing. the npm is a beautiful thing, and while there were many many ASP Classic developers back in the day, there was no such thing as npm and they resorted to newsgroups and forums to share code. Primitive approaches compared to what we do now, for sure.