Ah, so I’m back at it. The last time I heard about Node.js, I studiously ignored it, coz I wanted to learn Erlang first. But other things have intervened in the meantime, like Yahoo! Open Hack India in which they explicitly mentioned Node.js is a framework of choice/interest. Well, I thought I should give it a thought.
Didn’t actually end up using Node.js for the event, as I went with a friend’s idea, but after reading up quite a bit and trying out some basic things, I’m sufficiently intrigued to give it a shot. If you’re trying it out, though nowhere explicitly mentioned, you would do well to install npm – an already robust package manager for Node.js libraries. I will document more about the ecosystem as I work more with it.
Apart from that, I found a few nice things today. zile a handy emacs-like replacement for those little bits of editing on the server that you normally fire up vim or nano for. Also, the mirah programming language (formerly called Duby) an off shoot of the JRuby project. While the latter concentrates on compiling pure Ruby to JVM bytecode, Duby is a “Ruby-like” language, which directly outputs to JVM bytecode. That’s quite interesting in a lot of ways. Listen to the author in the screencast on the homepage, to know more.