JavaScript All the Way Down

http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/javascript-all-way-down

There is a well known story about a scientist who gave a talk about the Earth and its place in the solar system. At the end of the talk, a woman refuted him with "That's rubbish; the Earth is really like a flat dish, supported on the back of a turtle." The scientist smiled and asked back "But what's the turtle standing on?", to which the woman, realizing the logical trap, answered, "It's very simple: it's turtles all the way down!" No matter the verity of the anecdote, the identity of the scientist (Bertrand Russell or William James are sometimes mentioned), or even if they were turtles or tortoises, today we may apply a similar solution to Web development, with "JavaScript all the way down".
If you are going to develop a Web site, for client-side development, you could opt for Java applets, ActiveX controls, Adobe Flash animations and, of course, plain JavaScript. On the other hand, for server-side coding, you could go with C# (.Net), Java, Perl, PHP and more, running on servers, such as Apache, Internet Information Server, Nginx, Tomcat and the like. Currently, JavaScript allows you to do away with most of this and use a single programming language, both on the client and the server sides, and with even a JavaScript-based server. This way of working even has produced a totally JavaScript-oriented acronym along the lines of the old LAMP (Linux+Apache+MySQL+PHP) one: MEAN, which stands for MongoDB (a NoSQL database you can access with JavaScript), Express (a Node.js module to structure your server-side code), Angular.JS (Google's Web development framework for client-side code) and Node.js.
In this article, I cover several JavaScript tools for writing, testing and deploying Web applications, so you can consider whether you want to give a twirl to a "JavaScript all the way down" Web stack.

What's in a Name?

JavaScript originally was developed at Netscape in 1995, first under the name Mocha, and then as LiveScript. Soon (after Netscape and Sun got together; nowadays, it's the Mozilla Foundation that manages the language) it was renamed JavaScript to ride the popularity wave, despite having nothing to do with Java. In 1997, it became an industry standard under a fourth name, ECMAScript. The most common current version of JavaScript is 5.1, dated June 2011, and version 6 is on its way. (However, if you want to use the more modern features, but your browser won't support them, take a look at the Traceur compiler, which will back-compile version 6 code to version 5 level.)
Some companies produced supersets of the language, such as Microsoft, which developed JScript (renamed to avoid legal problems) and Adobe, which created ActionScript for use with Flash.
There are several other derivative languages (which actually compile to JavaScript for execution), such as the more concise CoffeeScript, Microsoft's TypeScript or Google's most recent AtScript (JavaScript plus Annotations), which was developed for the Angular.JS project. The asm.js project even uses a JavaScript subset as a target language for efficient compilers for other languages. Those are many different names for a single concept!

Why JavaScript?

Although stacks like LAMP or its Java, Ruby or .Net peers do power many Web applications today, using a single language both for client- and server-side development has several advantages, and companies like Groupon, LinkedIn, Netflix, PayPal and Walmart, among many more, are proof of it.
Modern Web development is split between client-side and server-side (or front-end and back-end) coding, and striving for the best balance is more easily attained if your developers can work both sides with the same ease. Of course, plenty of developers are familiar with all the languages needed for both sides of coding, but in any case, it's quite probable that they will be more productive at one end or the other.
Many tools are available for JavaScript (building, testing, deploying and more), and you'll be able to use them for all components in your system (Figure 1). So, by going with the same single set of tools, your experienced JavaScript developers will be able to play both sides, and you'll have fewer problems getting the needed programmers for your company.
Figure 1. JavaScript can be used everywhere, on the client and the server sides.
Of course, being able to use a single language isn't the single key point. In the "old days" (just a few years ago!), JavaScript lived exclusively in browsers to read and interpret JavaScript source code. (Okay, if you want to be precise, that's not exactly true; Netscape Enterprise Server ran server-side JavaScript code, but it wasn't widely adopted.) About five years ago, when Firefox and Chrome started competing seriously with (by then) the most popular Internet Explorer, new JavaScript engines were developed, separated from the layout engines that actually drew the HTML pages seen on browsers. Given the rising popularity of AJAX-based applications, which required more processing power on the client side, a competition to provide the fastest JavaScript started, and it hasn't stopped yet. With the higher performance achieved, it became possible to use JavaScript more widely (Table 1).

Table 1. The Current Browsers and Their JavaScript Engines

Browser	JavaScript Engine
Chrome	V8
Firefox	SpiderMonkey
Opera	Carakan
Safari	Nitro

Some of these engines apply advanced techniques to get the most speed and power. For example, V8 compiles JavaScript to native machine code before executing it (this is called JIT, Just In Time compilation, and it's done on the run instead of pre-translating the whole program as is traditional with compilers) and also applies several optimization and caching techniques for even higher throughput. SpiderMonkey includes IonMonkey, which also is capable of compiling JavaScript code to object code, although working in a more traditional way. So, accepting that modern JavaScript engines have enough power to do whatever you may need, let's now start a review of the Web stack with a server that wouldn't have existed if it weren't for that high-level language performance: Node.js.

Node.js: a New Kind of Server

Node.js (or plain Node, as it's usually called) is a Web server, mainly written itself in JavaScript, which uses that language for all scripting. It originally was developed to simplify developing real-time Web sites with push capabilities—so instead of all communications being client-originated, the server might start a connection with a client by itself. Node can work with lots of live connections, because it's very lightweight in terms of requirements. There are two key concepts to Node: it runs a single process (instead of many), and all I/O (database queries, file accesses and so on) is implemented in a non-blocking, asynchronous way.
Let's go a little deeper and further examine the main difference between Node and more traditional servers like Apache. Whenever Apache receives a request, it starts a new, separate thread (process) that uses RAM of its own and CPU processing power. (If too many threads are running, the request may have to wait a bit longer until it can be started.) When the thread produces its answer, the thread is done. The maximum number of possible threads depends on the average RAM requirements for a process; it might be a few thousand at the same time, although numbers vary depending on server size (Figure 2).
Figure 2. Apache and traditional Web servers run a separate thread for each request.
On the other hand, Node runs a single thread. Whenever a request is received, it is processed as soon as it's possible, and it will run continuously until some I/O is required. Then, while the code waits for the I/O results to be available, Node will be able to process other waiting requests (Figure 3). Because all requests are served by a single process, the possible number of running requests rises, and there have been experiments with more than one million concurrent connections—not shabby at all! This shows that an ideal use case for Node is having server processes that are light in CPU processing, but high on I/O. This will allow more requests to run at the same time; CPU-intensive server processes would block all other waiting requests and produce a high drop in output.
Figure 3. Node runs a single thread for all requests.
A great asset of Node is that there are many available modules (an estimate ran in the thousands) that help you get to production more quickly. Though I obviously can't list all of them, you probably should consider some of the modules listed in Table 2.

Table 2. Some widely used Node.js modules that will help your development and operation.

Module	Description
async	Simplifies asynchronous work, a possible alternative to promises.
cluster	Improves concurrency in multicore systems by forking worker processes. (For further scalability, you also could set up a reverse proxy and run several Node.js instances, but that goes beyond the objective of this article.)
connect	Works with "middleware" for common tasks, such as error handling, logging, serving static files and more.
ejs, handlebars or jade, EJS	Templating engines.
express	A minimal Web framework—the E in MEAN.
forever	A command-line tool that will keep your server up, restarting if needed after a crash or other problem.
mongoose, cradle, sequelize	Database ORM, for MongoDB, CouchDB and for relational databases, such as MySQL and others.
passport	Authentication middleware, which can work with OAuth providers, such as Facebook, Twitter, Google and more.
request or superagent	HTTP clients, quite useful for interacting with RESTful APIs.
underscore or lodash	Tools for functional programming and for extending the JavaScript core objects.

Of course, there are some caveats when using Node.js. An obvious one is that no process should do heavy computations, which would "choke" Node's single processing thread. If such a process is needed, it should be done by an external process (you might want to consider using a message queue for this) so as not to block other requests. Also, care must be taken with error processing. An unhandled exception might cause the whole server to crash eventually, which wouldn't bode well for the server as a whole. On the other hand, having a large community of users and plenty of fully available, production-level, tested code already on hand can save you quite a bit of development time and let you set up a modern, fast server environment.

Planning and Organizing Your Application

When starting out with a new project, you could set up your code from zero and program everything from scratch, but several frameworks can help you with much of the work and provide clear structure and organization to your Web application. Choosing the right framework will have an important impact on your development time, on your testing and on the maintainability of your site. Of course, there is no single answer to the question "What framework is best?", and new frameworks appear almost on a daily basis, so I'm just going with three of the top solutions that are available today: AngularJS, Backbone and Ember. Basically, all of these frameworks are available under permissive licenses and give you a head start on developing modern SPA (single page applications). For the server side, several packages (such as Sails, to give just one example) work with all frameworks.
AngularJS (or Angular.JS or just plain Angular—take your pick) was developed in 2009 by Google, and its current version is 1.3.4, dated November 2014. The framework is based on the idea that declarative programming is best for interfaces (and imperative programming for the business logic), so it extends HTML with custom tag attributes that are used to bind input and output data to a JavaScript model. In this fashion, programmers don't have to manipulate the Web page directly, because it is updated automatically. Angular also focuses on testing, because the difficulty of automatic testing heavily depends upon the code structure. Note that Angular is the A in MEAN, so there are some other frameworks that expand on it, such as MEAN.IO or MEAN.JS.
Backbone is a lighter, leaner framework, dated from 2010, which uses a RESTful JSON interface to update the server side automatically. (Fun fact: Backbone was created by Jeremy Ashkenas, who also developed CoffeeScript; see the "What's in a Name?" sidebar.) In terms of community size, it's second only to Angular, and in code size, it's by far the smallest one. Backbone doesn't include a templating engine of its own, but it works fine with Underscore's templating, and given that this library is included by default, it is a simple choice to make. It's considered to be less "opinionated" than other frameworks and to have a quite shallow learning curve, which means that you'll be able to start working quickly. A deficiency is that Backbone lacks two-way data binding, so you'll have to write code to update the view whenever the model changes and vice versa. Also, you'll probably be manipulating the Web page directly, which will make your code harder to unit test.
Finally, Ember probably is harder to learn than the other frameworks, but it rewards the coder with higher performance. It favors "convention over configuration", which likely will make Ruby on Rails or Symfony users feel right at home. It integrates easily with a RESTful server side, using JSON for communication. Ember includes Handlebars (see Table 2) for templating and provides two-way updates. A negative point is the usage of