Not long ago it was considered revolutionary to do all of your holiday shopping from your computer. Amazon and other companies on

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Will 2010 be the Year of Net TV Shopping Integration?

Last month was Javascript season in Europe, with two conferences dedicated to the language that powers interactive web applications, and a third , which featured it heavily. If a common theme emerged, it was the buzz about Javascript leaping out of the browser to serve other domains, and the noise has only become louder in the aftermath. Of all the applications outside the browser, server-side Javascript is the most alluring for reasons described in this post. An idea that would have had you laughed out of the room a few years ago is edging towards reality. Sponsor Javascript outside the browser? Some of the applications are graphical user-interface platforms similar to the browser, e.g. Adobe Air, television sets. With other applications, there's not even a graphical user interface. For example, some have suggested using it as a general-purpose Unix scripting language. This guest post was written by Michael Mahemoff , who works at Osmosoft as lead web developer and blogs regularly for Ajaxian and on his his personal blog, Software As She's Developed . You can follow him on Twitter . The Perfect Storm Server-side Javascript isn't a new phenomenon; Netscape stuck Javascript in the server way back in 1996, right after they introduced it to the world as a browser technology. Interest soon waned, and the language was confined to the browser for the most part. Even there, it didn't get a whole lot of respect and was frequently dismissed as a hack language capable of no more than annoying alert boxes and gratuitous ticker tape animations. But suddenly, serious web-based applications started sprouting up. GMail, Google Maps, and JotSpot (kind of a Google Docs predecessor) were all running inside the browser. They weren't supported by Flash, nor ActiveX, but Javascript manipulating the browser's Document Object Model (DOM). The term "Ajax" was coined to describe these applications, and a community flourished. A few years on, Javascript has become the world's most popular programming language by some accounts. Not so surprising when you consider its special status as the standard language shipped with all major browsers. It's the web's lingua franca. While most web developers have a favourite, primary, language for server-side work, they converge on Javascript when it comes to the browser. Javascript today can be compared to the English language: it's arguably the most popular language as long as you count basic competency, not just outright fluency. Given that you're already using it in the browser, why not stick it in the server too? One language all the way down makes it easier for a single programmer to work on either side of the wire; there's less of a mental shift. For project managers, the trend would make it easier to move developer resources between the front end and the back end if a common language is used on both. Many in the developer community now recognize Javascript as a respectable language, with understood patterns for effective use. In fact, many of Javascript's negatives were a case of misdiagnosis: the problem was really the browsers' DOM (Document Object Model) APIs, not the language itself. Take those out of the equation and you're left with a solid language capable of tackling diverse problems. There's also a promising reuse story for this "dual-side Javascript" scenario. Take form validation for example. Right now, it's common to write the same logic in two different languages. In Javascript, you write a validator to give the user immediate feedback inside the browser, and in a language like PHP, you write a validator to ensure data integrity once the form data has been uploaded to the server. But once you switch to Javascript on the server, you just need to write a single validation routine at both ends. Under some styles of development, you can also arrange for a function in the browser to directly call another function inside the server; the code is smaller and simpler to write, not being bogged down in the technical details of transferring data across the network. Javascript performance has also moved forward in leaps and bounds, thanks to browser competition. Firefox's Javascript engine, Spidermonkey, increased in speed by a factor of 20-40x . Safari's underlying engine - Squirrelfish, aka Nitro - posted similarly impressive gains (see chart below), and Google Chrome came on the scene last year along with its highly optimized V8 Javascript engine, a very real contender in the "fastest Javasript engine" stakes. Server-side Javascript also dovetails nicely the new breed of NOSQL databases . Being web-native, these databases tend to communicate in HTTP, and in some cases JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) is the message format. Javascript libraries already include support for exactly that kind of interaction and programmers are familiar with them. Some of these NOSQL systems go beyond data persistence and into the zone of full-fledged Javascript application environments. Next page: Towards A Mature Server-Side Ecology Towards A Mature Server-Side Ecology In the simplest case, all you need to run server-side Javascript is a Javascript engine to plug a web server into. There are plenty of open source options here; the choice will come down to the language its implemented in, which affects the kind of environments it can run in, in addition to the usual factors like performance and level of support. Many Javascript platforms run on the Rhino engine for example, and Rhino is built in Java; this means that they can easily integrate with Java components. Thus, you can build the entire user-interface in Javascript - including a thin UI layer on the server - and still have it backed by a conventional enterprise Java stack. Helma is one prominent example of this architecture. Once equipped with a Javascript engine, you can write simple CGI scripts as you would with any other language - read the request, write the response. In practice, you'll also want good library support to get anything useful done. Some environments do come with libraries, and you can also make use of existing libraries developed for browser-based Javascript. What will really make the biggest impact, though, is industry-wide standardisation. To that end, there's a strong grassroots movement underway to converge on a complete API: CommonJS is defining an API for file access, networking, unit testing, and so on, as well as declaring how these components should be packaged for easy import. Multiple efforts are implementing the nascent spec in several major Javascript engines (Rhino, Spidermonkey, V8, EjScript). One open-source platform complying with CommonJS is Narwhal . It has considerable momentum and runs on several of the Javascript engines. CommonJS is raising the level of abstraction for server-side Javascript and allowing developers to use patterns familiar from high-level servers in other environments. Writing a web server no longer means hand-coding the lower-level cruft. Thus, you get a framework like Jack , which is similar to Python's WSGI and Ruby's Rack . Jack's based on the idea of fine-grained "middleware" libraries, able to be composed and reused, and there's a separate project, Nitro , to build such components for Jack. So Nitro builds on Jack, and Jack builds on CommonJS. This is an example of the ecosystem beginning to emerge in server-side Javascript. Use the Force! Building on Javascript's Strengths In the previous section, I treated Javascript as just another language with all the usual server-side abstractions and the well-trodden path towards modularity and reuse. That's not a bad thing at all, since we also benefit from the synergies of running the same language in the browser and the server mentioned earlier. Where things get really interesting, though, is with frameworks that exploit Javascript's unique characteristics. It's easy to get carried away with Javascript's efficacy as a regular scripting language, so let's remind ourselves that its roots are inside the browser. What the browser has, that a generic web framework doesn't, is the Document Object Model (DOM). This is the browser's model of the web page's contents. What if we gave Javascript access to a DOM? DOM access is a key feature of the Jaxer environment. It gives scripts access to an entire server-side Firefox instance. Developers can therefore manipulate content as they would in a client-side application, and output the resulting page. This overcomes one of the objections with Ajax apps, which is "what if the user has turned off Javascript?". The page still comes out as plain old HTML. That's a lot of power, and the patterns for using this kind of thing are not yet fully understood, but it has plenty of potential for exploration. There are also potentially great benefits for testing client-side applications if you can simulate an entire browser instance. jQuery founder has been working on a product called env.js . Where Jaxer is essentially an entire Firefox instance, env.js is an attempt to build a simulation of the browser environment from scratch, under active development. It's too early to say if its scope will stretch beyond testing and into the realm of server-side Javascript. DOM manipulation may be one characteristic thing about Javascript we can exploit, but there is also another (related) thing: event-handling. The language was more or less designed to respond to user events, so it has a great model for handling them that is familiar to any Javascript programmer worth their salt. For most server-side programmers, event-handling capability will yield a big fat "who gives a damn?". Server-side scripts don't sit around waiting for events to come in. They usually just look at an incoming request, deal with it, and send out a response. Then they exit as soon as they can. All good stuff, but there's a completely different paradigm possible. It's part of the trend towards the real-time web and the design pattern known as Comet. With Comet, the server holds on to the connection for a while, and continues to stream out information intermittently to the browser. The typical example is a two-way chat - as soon as one guy says something, the Comet server sends the message to the other guy. This is event-driven programming all over again, and compared to the usual suspects on the server, Javascript is well-placed to support this paradigm. A framework that's taking advantage of all this is node.js , or just "Node" to its friends. Node is interesting because it requires scripts to explicitly close the connection; if they don't close it, the connection just stays open and the script can handle events as they come in, usually by sending more information down to the browser. Less than a year old, the project already has a strong community and numerous derivative frameworks and applications . A similar model has been used in other frameworks, like Python's twisted, but Javascript may turn out to offer a neater syntax for this kind of thing. By daring to be different and using javascript for what it's best at, Node is shaping up as a framework to watch. The speed of Node apps is likely to give Javascript serious cred among server-side developers. Next page: The Cloud. Of Course, the Cloud! The Cloud. Of Course, the Cloud! No article on server trends could ignore the famous cloud. How does javascript work in virtualised computing environments? With a suitable engine, you can certainly set up an environment manually using amazon EC2, google app engine, or similar cloud hosts. However, you can do it easier than that with some of the other solutions around. Joyent took a big bet on Javascript when it acquired Reasonably Smart earlier this year; the host now offers a dead-simple runway to host Javascript scaleably. Aptana, the company behind the Jaxer platform described above, does likewise. Something's Going on Here Before we get too excited about this trend, I should make one thing clear. Conspicuous by their absence are the real-world server-side Javascript apps. There don't appear to be many sites running Javascript in the server at this time. Probably the most popular site powered by Javascript is EtherPad , the real-time collaborative notepad from AppJet, the company acquired by Google last week. This is a cautionary example, because AppJet launched as a cloud-based server-side Javascript framework before dropping it to concentrate on Etherpad. Aptana has also announced they are pulling back on Jaxer due to difficulties monetising it. Maybe this is more of a statement about cloud hosting revenue models than server-side Javascript, but it's worth asking how other attempts to propagate server-side Javascript will fare. One of the critical success factors will be a comprehensive standard API; it's a prerequisite to a vibrant ecosystem of interoperable components, and with a range of engines to run on. We now have the seeds of that with commonJS. Another factor is best practices for using the language; again, we've already discovered much of that as a side benefit of the Ajax revolution. Frameworks like Node, which build on Javascript's unique characteristics, are building on those to establish best practices for server-side Javascript. Reuse of both knowledge and practices will give Javascript its best chance yet to stand up as a viable alternative to the usual server-side suspects. Although Javascript is a far better language than was previously assumed, its syntax still has plenty of quirks. If we restrict ourselves to the subset of Javascript found in all the major browsers today - and arguably it makes sense to do so - it's arguably lacking certain features of other server-side languages. Those other languages are free to evolve autonomously; in contrast, Javascript's fate is heavily determined by standards bodies, browser manufacturers, and the patterns around how users upgrade their browser. In this sense, the language's strength - shipping with every browser - is also an Achilles' Heel. That said, the language may well prove "good enough". The benefits of "one language all the way down" may outweigh the cost in many cases. The will is stronger than ever to make server-side Javascript a reality, and it's translating into a visible surge of activity in the web community. There's the promise of code reuse and the possibility of cutting in half the number of programming languages involved in building a typical web application. Many smart developers have gravitated towards Javascript in recent years, as a means of producing world-class front-end apps. The attention has progressed our understanding of the language. Should server-side Javascript go mainstream, a third wave of Javascript developers will be joining the community and enriching the ecosystem. Photo by Dmitry Baranovskiy Discuss

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Server-Side Javascript: Back With a Vengeance

Bandwidth.com is unveiling FlexNetwork , its nationwide IP voice service that it built from the ground up, making it arguably one of the most significant VoIP investments in the past decade. Most IP voice networks grow by acquisition, which can mean inheriting legacy systems that require significant upgrades. Bandwidth.com built FlexNetwork at a fraction of the cost compared to IP voice networks built earlier in the decade. Sponsor By building its own network, FlexNetwork can feature the latest IP voice technologies such as HD Voice. What's HD Voice? It's a high quality voice service that takes away some of the quality issues that encumber traditional VoIP services. Here's a video that explains HD Voice and Phonebooth , its cloud-based telephony service. VoIP Heroes Episode 2: Phonebooth OnDemand from Bandwidth.com on Vimeo . Application developers in the new world of Voice 2.0 may be the biggest winners with the FlexNetwork. These service providers often need the network to uniquely support what they're building. Most network providers simply aren't that flexible. Serving application developers is working out pretty well. The network is now on pace to deliver almost 4 billion minutes and 1 million numbers this year. The savings for a small business can be significant with VoIP. FlexNetwork looks like it could be quite a disruptive force in the telecommunications market by providing a service that is reliable, more affordable and a haven for application developers. Discuss

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FlexNetwork: The Nationwide IP Voice Network from Bandwidth.com

"We live in public" isn't just the name of a film; it's an Internet truism. For the past ten years, more and more of us have been using blogging platforms to share the details of our personal and professional lives. With the advent of microblogging, the sharing has escalated to include the most intimate, immediate, and even mundane details of one's daily grind. When pressures abound, venting online is second nature; but oversharing can bear disastrous consequences. The cure? Penzu 's private-by-design, sharable-by-choice blogging software. Sponsor Unlike most modern CMSs (and actually somewhat reminiscent of dotcom-era systems such as Livejournal), Penzu focuses on personal journaling and privacy. The company, a small Canadian outfit which launched last summer, says its posts are private by default. An in spite of its focus on privacy, the system is hardly antisocial. Flickr photos can be imported, and each entry comes with an optional URL for sharing on other networks. The new Penzu Pro features, available for the relatively low price of $19 a year,are pretty useful, as well. With the free version, users can create, save, search and share journal entries. The paid version of the software allows users to also import entires from just about any kind of blog (in case oversharing has been a problem in your past) and export Penzu entries, as well as giving users a slew of customization options, offsite backups and military-grade 256-bit AES encryption for maximum data protection. And just in time for the holidays, Penzu Pro is giftable for the oversharer in your network. We gave Penzu a spin and were impressed by the interface and the entire concept of private blogging. The company has taken something old, given it a beautifully modern UI, added beneficial features and made a useful product that addresses a common problem. Certainly, WordPress, Blogger, and other CMSs allow for locked posts. But the idea of having a separate destination for one's innermost thoughts gives the end user a little more comfort to express himself freely. Give it a spin, and let us know in the comments how the experience feels to you. Discuss

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Is Oversharing a Problem? Try Penzu

Social networking site MySpace has just launched a new version of their mobile website designed for iPhone, Android, and Palm WebOS users. The now improved site at m.myspace.com offers quick access to your profile, including comments, your activity stream, your status, your inbox, and more. Also available is a dedicated photos button which makes it easier to browse through your photo albums. However, the most notable of the new features is the built-in instant messaging functionality which makes the new mobile website a communication tool in addition to being just another social networking app. Sponsor New Features Although the mobile site at m.myspace.com is available from any mobile web browser, the newly updated version only displays to users of select smartphones. That's because the new site is specifically designed to take advantage of features present in the advanced web browsers present on those devices. Users visiting from other phones will still encounter the older site, which itself was revamped at the beginning of the year with a new look designed to make it more closely resemble the original, desktop-based website. In addition to real-time updates from MySpace, the new mobile site introduces a built-in instant messaging client which displays a web-enabled version of MySpace IM, the company's own instant messaging service. By tapping on the "IM" button under the "Me" tab, you can instantly go online and chat with friends just as if you were using a standalone instant messaging software application. Mobile Website Now Outperforms Native Apps What's most interesting about the new web-based IM functionality in the updated site is the fact that this is (for now) the only official tool provided by the company for IM'ing from your mobile device. Believe it or not, the dedicated mobile applications built for the iPhone, Android, and Palm do not include an IM client at all. This has been a much-requested feature from MySpace users who have had no other choice but to use third-party applications like BeeJive IM , for example. In fact, a quick Google search on the topic leads to multiple MySpace forum posts begging for this feature as well as this user-created YouTube video demonstrating how you can get MySpace IM on your iPhone via other methods. According to the company , 75% of their user base accesses the mobile web site, which could explain why they've focused on updating the site first before updating the native apps. However, it's likely that the majority of their mobile web visitors are those without expensive smartphones who are being redirected to the older site instead. Without detailed statistics from the company itself, this is only a guess, but given outside demographic studies that show how MySpace is dominated by younger users while it also (perhaps not coincidentally) registers as the social networking site whose users have the lowest income levels , it seems probable that the network's mobile website visitors don't own very expensive mobile devices. That makes the smartphone mobile website update and any forthcoming native app updates somewhat of a nonstarter for a good many MySpace users anyway. It will be interesting to see if MySpace soon updates their native applications to include this new functionality as well or if they're more sold on the idea that the mobile web is - or at least should be - the app of choice for their users. If you're interested in visiting the new site, you can do so via m.myspace.com using your phone's web browser. The new changes have gone live for everyone as of now. Discuss

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MySpace Launches New Mobile Website with Built-in IM

In a late night post on Facebook's company blog , CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced a round of upcoming changes that will affect all users of the social network. Specifically, the changes focus on new privacy controls for information sharing. For those who have been following Facebook closely, the announcement doesn't deliver any new information, it only confirms some previously discussed plans. However, for Facebook's user base, now 350 million strong, the updates represent a major overhaul as to how privacy is handled on the site. Sponsor Change #1: No More Regional Networks Over the years, Facebook has grown from a tightly closed social network designed for connecting college students to an entirely open network which anyone and everyone can join. At first, Facebook's privacy model revolved around "networks" - communities for your school, your region, or your company. "This worked well when Facebook was mostly used by students," Zuckerberg writes, "since it made sense that a student might want to share content with their fellow students." Over time, the company added more networks, including some for entire countries. But now, thanks to Facebook's ever-growing popularity, these "regional" networks have grown so large that some have millions of members. The problem with networks of this size when it comes to privacy is that people who had opted in to sharing content with their network (via the setting share with my "networks and friends" ) were inadvertently be sharing personal updates with far more people than they intended to. To address this issue, Facebook demoted cities and regions from being considered networks although the information still exists in user profiles, listed under "Current City" and/or "Current Region." This update isn't exactly news - the company revealed their plans to remove regional networks back in July of this year. Zuckerberg's mentioning of this update seems to be more of a confirmation that indeed, this process is underway, than any sort of major announcement about a new direction for Facebook. Change #2: Control Who Sees Each Piece of Individual Content You Add or Upload A second privacy update involves Facebook's plans to allow its users more control over individual pieces of content uploaded or added to the social network. This control will be implemented on a per-post basis through a mechanism dubbed the "Publisher Privacy Control." Simply put, this change adds a new feature to the publisher box on Facebook - aka the status update box. From here, Facebook users post their status, upload photos and videos, and share links. At the moment, when you click the "Share" button, who sees that content is governed by settings tucked away under a cavalcade of menus (Settings -> Privacy Settings -> Profile -> Status and Links.) With the the upcoming Publisher Control functionality, already in beta testing , a new button featuring an image of lock will appear beneath the status update box. Click on this button and you'll be able to choose precisely who is allowed to see that update or other piece of content ("everyone," "friends," "friends of friends," etc.) Change #3: A Simplified Privacy Page Facebook's granular privacy controls have always been sort of a blessing and curse for the social network. Although savvy users could drill down into each individual setting and adjust it to their needs, the majority of the site's users don't even know where these settings are, much less how to change them or to what . The problem, as noted above, is that many of the privacy settings are buried in a series of complex menus. Even if you can find the Privacy Page, the drop-down boxes and their lists of choices stump average users who aren't sure what a setting like "my networks and friends" really means. To make privacy simpler, Facebook's controls will be changed to permit sharing with three groups: "only friends," "friends of friends," or "everyone." In addition, the Privacy Page itself will be simplified to combine some settings which currently overlap. This, too, was announced in July . Although neither post details specifically what settings will be combined, a quick glance at the Privacy Page allows for some speculation. Perhaps the "basic info" and "personal info" boxes will become one? There really isn't that much distinction between the two, despite what their names imply. For example, "basic" information includes what many consider "personal" information such as birthday, hometown, and religious views. Meanwhile, the so-called "personal" information setting controls more innocuous content like favorite books and movie. The "Photos Tagged of You" and the "Videos Tagged of You" settings also seem like worthy contenders for combination. It seems that you're either okay with people seeing content you've been tagged in by others or you're not. Whether that's a photo or video doesn't really matter to most. However, these are just guesses, mind you - until the update goes live, there's no way to tell what will and will not be changed. How the Transition Will Occur Although not mentioned by name in Zuckerberg's blog post, the July post mentioned a new "Transition Tool" that would be rolled out to users to aid them in configuring the new settings. This is likely what Zuckerberg was referring to when he noted that "we'll suggest settings for you..." With the Transition Tool, users are prompted to pick from different privacy level options like "open," "recommended," or "limited." According to the recent post, the recommended settings will be based on your current level of privacy but you'll be able to read through the other options to make changes if you so desire. Beginning with a small group of users, Facebook has been testing six different versions of this tool to determine what works best. Based on feedback from the group, the testing tool will be refined to a final version before all the changes are made available to the entire network. However, since the recent post made no mention of a timeline for these changes, the implication is that these new updates are not going live just yet. Instead, the post was merely setting the stage for what's to come. Why Facebook Cares About Privacy It's good to see Facebook taking the issue of privacy seriously. Although it's easy to blame the user for over-sharing and then having to deal with harsh consequences like job loss or even, remarkably, the loss of health-care benefits by sharing some items too publicly, at the end of the day, affected users will not blame themselves, they will blame Facebook. And those reading these "social network horror stories" in the media could ultimately become too afraid to post to the site, leading to a less active user base, or worse - users deleting their accounts. Privacy issues are bad news for Facebook, just as they were bad news for MySpace back when they were king. For years, there were so many news stories about sexual predators on MySpace that eventually the public perception of MySpace was that the network wasn't very safe. Instead of going that route and allowing the media stories about Facebook blunders to control the network's public image, these privacy changes are designed to preempt the missteps and mistakes the not-so-savvy user base may make by making Facebook privacy simpler and more refined while also more representative of the large network Facebook has become. Discuss

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How Facebook's New Privacy Changes Will Affect You

After a long weekend, you may find you're all caught up on your favorite shows. If you're looking for a new source for entertainment, Berkeley-based community Redux is finally emerging from closed beta. ReadWriteWeb first covered Redux's Facebook and Twitter integration in early October . Since then the company has increased its member base, created some new tools and most importantly, built on the strength of its video. Sponsor Similar to Digg, Redux allows users to upload, share and vote on content across the network. Tools like its embeddable blogging widget and inline video comment threads encourage ongoing dialogue and engagement. The community's best content and dialogue has been its video, and TV mode is a way to celebrate that. Redux lets you stream videos continuously in full screen mode from your friends, networks, and favorite channels. Because the community pulls a live feed from your Twitter and Facebook networks, clips arrive as real-time suggestions from friends and community members. In the past ReadWriteWeb has looked to Redux as a great way to bypass Bit.ly's malware issues as the site offers a thumbnail preview prior to clicking on links. With TV Mode, users can bypass the act of clicking altogether and watch an unadulterated stream of real-time video. To register visit Redux . Discuss

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Redux Launches as Twitter's Real-Time Video Feed