Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg told a live audience this weekend that the world has changed, that it’s become more public and less private, and that the controversial new default and permanent settings reflect how the site would work if he were to create it today. Not everyone agrees with his move and its justification. Has society become less private or is it Facebook that’s pushing people in that direction? Is privacy online just an illusion anyway? Below are some thoughts, based primarily on the pro-privacy reactions to Zuckerberg’s statements from many of our readers this weekend. Though there is a lot to be said for analysis of public data (more on that later), I believe that Facebook is making a big mistake by moving away from its origins based on privacy for user data. Sponsor In Facebook’s early days, and for the vast majority of the site’s life, its primary differentiator was that your user data was only visible to other users that you approved friend requests from. As of mid-December, Facebook users were no longer allowed to hide from the web-at-large some information including their profile photos, list of friends and interests in the form of fan pages they followed. Text, photo and video updates shared on the site have always been by default private (friends only) but if you’d never changed your privacy settings before last month, then Facebook suggested you switch them to make those updates publicly visible to everyone. That became the new default. Here are three reasons why making some of this data public by requirement and some public by default is the wrong thing to do and why society is not in fact changing the way that Zuckerberg claims it is. Evolving Preferences Don’t Justify Elimination of Choice Mark Zuckerberg might be right, people probably are becoming more comfortable telling the world at large about more and different parts of their lives. Why does that mean it’s ok to take away peoples’ choices and force them to make public some of their information all the time? That just doesn’t make sense. Privacy is a fundamental human right and while that may seem less true when we’re operating on corporate turf like Facebook, Facebook used to be based on privacy. Why give it up so easily? (Isn’t it a cause for concern that so much of our civic interaction now goes on through this and other corporate channels?) It’s very hard to believe that the hundreds of millions of mainstream Facebook users are wanting to throw their privacy out the window – and if Facebook believes they are, why not just ask them clearly? Privacy Doesn’t Just Mean Secrecy This Summer we wrote about the academic research of University of Massachusetts-Amherst Legal Studies student Chris Peterson, who argues that an accurate and contemporary understanding of privacy is based more on the integrity of context than on absolute secrecy. Peterson tackles the contemporary reality of privacy on Facebook in a very readable draft thesis paper titled Saving Face: The Privacy Architecture of Facebook (PDF). Peterson argues that the idea that anything published ought to be understood as intended for public distribution is an antiquated understanding from the era when publishing was expensive and required a lot of effort. The opposite is true today, it’s free and easy to publish – so information at different levels of appropriateness for public eyes is being published. Why not support that? “There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment… It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug into your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live – did live, from habit that became instinct – in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.” – George Orwell, 1984 Instead of what Facebook is doing, Peterson says that a more appropriate understanding of privacy today is based on context. We expect our communication to go on in an appropriate context (no drinking in church or praying in the bar) and we expect to understand how our communication will be distributed. If a college friend took photos of you drinking in a bar and showed them off to people in church, you might feel your privacy has been violated in both appropriateness and distribution. The bar is a public place, though, and not completely secret. Thus the need for a more sophisticated understanding of privacy that is more than mere secrecy. By pushing your personal information and conversation through activity updates fully into the public, Facebook is eliminating any integrity of context that these conversations would naturally have. Posted updates can be directed only to limited lists of Facebook contacts, like college buddies or work friends, but that option is buried under more public default options and much of a user’s activity on the site is not subject to that kind of option. “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.” – Google CEO Eric Schmidt Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg used to say that people would share more information if they felt comfortable knowing that it would only be visible to people they trusted. He told me in an interview two years ago that users who wanted to do so couldn’t take their data off of the site because privacy control “is the vector around which Facebook operates.” Now apparently, he’s changed his mind. This weekend I argued that his justification for the new stance is not credible. Many People Need Control Over Personal Information Do people no longer need to keep access to some of their personal information online limited just to trusted friends? Facebook seems to be arguing that they don’t. There is a long list of people who clearly do, though, including: people who’ve escaped abusive relationships, people with marginalized religious or sexual preferences, people who fear losing their jobs or who’ve been pushed around by bullies throughout their lives. That list adds up to a very large portion of the world, in fact. The group of Ivy League elites who run Facebook might think there’s no reason to be able to control access to their personal information, but many of them are less socially vulnerable and have less need to control their personal information. Consider this comment left by one of our readers in response to Zuckerberg’s statement this weekend. “As a person who is being stalked for being an innocent bystander in a child custody case, I can tell you that losing my choices over what is searchable or not is huge. I have nothing to hide nor be ashamed of but the loss of choice for my privacy has hit home in a poignant manner.” Stories like that are far more common than you might think and removing user control over what’s public removes the ability for millions of people to safely participate on Facebook. More than millions, tens or hundreds of millions of people around the world have reason to limit visibility of their personal information from the web but still want to be able to share that information with trusted contacts. Facebook became a huge success on that premise and ought to be able to continue to thrive without doing a 180 degree turn on privacy. Coming soon: The positive side of Facebook data made public. Hint. Discuss

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Why Facebook is Wrong: Privacy Is Still Important

In this edition of the Weekly Wrapup – our newsletter summarizing the top stories of the week – we report on a new “superphone” launched by Google, take a look at how the Web is transforming personal finance, give you 5 reasons why RSS Readers still rock, get a first look at the new startup of ex-Facebook CTO Adam D’Angelo, analyze the trends that emerged from this year’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES), and more. And as usual we check in on our two main channels: ReadWriteEnterprise (devoted to ‘enterprise 2.0′ trends and products) and ReadWriteStart (our daily resource for entrepreneurs). Also read on for details of the newly released printed edition of our current premium report , about the Real-Time Web. Sponsor Now Available: Printed Edition of The Real-Time Web Report At the request of the librarian community and people that just like paper , we have made The Real-Time Web and its Future report available in print . For those of you that prefer it digitally, you can still download it . Don’t forget about our Community Management Report . It too is coming in print soon, so watch out for it! Web Trends How The Web is Transforming Personal Finance Not too long ago, personal finance tools like Quicken and Microsoft Money used to be bound to the desktop. Today, free online tools like Mint , moneyStrands and Wesabe make it easy to track financial information. So you can now get a better overview of your personal finances than ever before. Editor’s note : This story is part of ReadWriteWeb’s Personal Finance series, a weekly, three-month-long look at how the Internet has transformed personal finance. If you are interested in sponsoring this Content Series on Personal Finance, please contact our COO Sean Ammirati . 5 Reasons Why RSS Readers Still Rock Recently we wrote about the decline of RSS Readers as a way for people to keep up with news. We noted that while many people still use RSS Readers, usage has decreased due to the emergence of real-time and social flows of information via Twitter, Facebook and other such services. The post sparked a fascinating discussion, with over 160 comments. What we learned from that discussion is that while the RSS Reader market is indeed in decline, there are still a number of compelling use cases for RSS Readers. Welcome to the Age of Robot Reporters Recently, three emergency vehicles responded to a report of an unconscious person at the world headquarters of Nike Inc. in Portland, Oregon. How did we know? An automated form-pumping robot from startup company Nozzl Media told us. Nozzl Media unveiled this week a demonstration of its first product, a widget intended for newspaper websites seeking to display real-time local information derived from Twitter messages, blog posts and automatically extracted public records. Web Apps Meet Consumer Electronics at CES The 2010 edition of the Consumer Electronics Show ( CES ) saw a big trend emerge: web applications being ported to consumer electronics , from the technology inside cars to Web-enabled TVs. Earlier this week we noted that online music service Pandora will be made available in cars , courtesy of a new Pioneer device that will begin selling in March. Other evidence of this trend can be found in Ford’s announcement of a new in-car system and Samsung’s latest Internet-connected TV . SEE MORE WEB TRENDS COVERAGE IN OUR TRENDS CATEGORY ReadWriteEnterprise Our channel ReadWriteEnterprise , devoted to ‘enterprise 2.0′ and using social software inside organizations. The Pros and Cons of the Google Nexus One As An Enterprise Phone The Nexus One is another smart phone that we will inevitably see inside the walls of the enterprise. Smart phones seem to have a way of being used for all kinds of work activities. So, what are the pros and cons of using the Nexus One in the enterprise? ReadWriteStart Our channel ReadWriteStart , sponsored by Microsoft BizSpark , is dedicated to profiling startups and entrepreneurs. 5 Web Apps To Keep Your Startup Organized In a world where emails, phone calls, texts, and Tweets constantly bombard us, it is getting harder and harder to manage the firehose of data and information being thrust our way. For young companies to succeed this environment, it is imparitive they become organized and efficient lest they fall behind and quickly become overwhelmed. Never Mind the Valley: Here’s Los Angeles Best known for its movie stars, sun and surf, Los Angeles probably isn’t the first place you’d think to breed technology. But when you consider the influence of investors like Jason Calacanis and Mark Suster, in addition to the fact that companies like Demand Media and Docstoc call Southern California home, it’s not surprising that the community is emerging as one of the country’s hottest startup hubs. SEE MORE STARTUPS COVERAGE IN OUR READWRITESTART CHANNEL Web Products Live Blog: Google’s Android Press Gathering Google held a press event this week to showcase the new Nexus One , which it described as “Where Web Meets Phone.” Google calls this a new category of phones – the “super phones.” The Nexus One apparently “pushes the limits of what is possible on a mobile phone today.” Google will sell the phone in its own web store. Check out our live blog coverage for more details. Droid’s December Boom: Metrics Show Device Use Doubled in One Month The Android platform has grown exponentially since mid-2009, but December’s stats show a particular factor that might help catapult the platform to greater heights of user adoption. In figures just released from mobile advertising company AdMob, the Droid singlehandedly boosted calls to their network by nearly 300 million requests. Facebook’s 1st CTO Launches His Next Company Adam D’Angelo was a programming genius who knew Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg in high school, became the young company’s first CTO and has just begun to unveil his new startup company, Quora . Built by D’Angelo and a team of crack young engineers, Quora is a real-time enabled Q&A site. The company calls itself “A continually improving collection of questions and answers.” Skype: Coming to a Couch Near You Starting this spring, you won’t need to gather the whole family around a 15-inch laptop screen to talk with cousin Joe on the other side of the country. As a matter of fact, you won’t even need to get up off the sofa after the evening news, because Skype is coming to the big screen – the big TV screen, that is. Skype announced this week that they have been working with LG and Panasonic to embed Skype in Internet-connected widescreen HDTVs. SEE MORE WEB PRODUCTS COVERAGE IN OUR PRODUCTS CATEGORY That’s a wrap for another week! Enjoy your weekend everyone. Discuss

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Weekly Wrapup: Google Nexus One, CES Coverage, Online Finance, And More…

Not too long ago, personal finance tools like Quicken and Microsoft Money used to be bound to the desktop. Exchanging information with your banks used to be a hassle. Keeping track of credit card purchases was often a question of waiting for statements to arrive by mail and then entering data by hand. Today, free tools like Mint , moneyStrands and Wesabe make it easy to track all of this information. Thanks to this, you can now get a better overview of your personal finances than ever before. Sponsor Editor’s note : This story is part of ReadWriteWeb’s Personal Finance series, a weekly, three-month-long look at how the Internet has transformed personal finance. Up until April 15, which is the deadline for U.S. readers to file their taxes, we’ll be looking at how personal finance has evolved, analyzing top web tools and posting video of our conversations with the people who are shaping the online world of personal finance. If you are interested in sponsoring the rest of this Content Series on Personal Finance, please contact our COO Sean Ammirati . Mint: Leading the Charge Currently, the two most well-known online tools for personal finance management are arguably Mint and Intuit’s Quicken Online . Mint stood out from the pack early on because the company made it extremely easy to keep track of all your expenses. After giving Mint access to your bank and credit card account, the service simply downloads your financial information at regular intervals and organizes it. Mint can even track your 401(k) for you. Mint launched in September 2007 and quickly became the darling of the Web 2.0 world. Unlike most of its desktop-bound competitors, Mint managed to talk to virtually every bank and credit card issuer from day one. In October 2008, Mint came out of beta . Today, the company has more than 1.7 million registered users and sees roughly 700,000 active users every month. In October 2009, the company was signing up 30,000 new users per week. Mint’s success didn’t go unnoticed by the incumbent market leaders and Intuit acquired Mint in October 2009. In November 2009, Intuit announced that it would begin to phase out Quicken Online in favor of Mint. Microsoft suspended sales of Microsoft Money on June 30, 2009 and doesn’t plan to compete in the market anymore . Correction : In December, Microsoft actually announced a plan to enter the personal finance market again with a Mint-like tool it is developing in collaboration with Citi. Beyond Mint While Mint gets most of the mindshare on the web these days, it’s by no means the only player in this market. Indeed, the success of Mint has given rise to a plethora of similar tools and legitimizes the efforts of companies that tried to enter this market before Mint. ClearCheckbook.com , for example, launched in May 2006. The company focuses on bringing checkbook management online. A number of other tools are competing more directly with Mint. Wesabe , for example, also focuses on giving users an overview of how they spend their money. Sadly, Wesabe makes downloading your information from your checking and credit card accounts a bit more difficult than Mint. Since acquiring Exepnsr , Strands now also offers its own personal finance tool for setting up and tracking personal budgets and staying on top of your finances. Geezeo – which was founded in 2006, and also looks a lot like Mint, has a very strong focus on budgeting. Most of these tools focus on the U.S. market, but more and more of them are also now available outside of the United States. Kublax , for example, offers a Mint-like service in the U.K. Going Mobile Just like almost every other category of online tools, personal finance tools are also making the move to mobile. Mint and Wesabe , for example, offer both an iPhone app and mobile-optimized websites. Most importantly, all of these services are also able to send out alerts to your phone – either through push alerts on the iPhone or as text messages. Whenever you run the risk of exceeding your credit card limit, for example, these services will send you an alert. Of course, a number of banks have also gotten into this game and now offer their own mobile apps. The Bank of America , Chase Mobile and Wells Fargo apps are currently among the top 10 most downloaded free finance iPhone apps, for example. When it comes to paying your bills, apps like BillMinder and BillTracker make it easy to never forget when a bill is due. What’s Next? Over the last few years, the web has clearly transformed the way we use personal finance software. Over the next few months, we will have a closer look at the current generation of personal budgeting and finance tools on the web. We will also analyze the current trends around online finance software. This is the first post in our upcoming series about personal finance. If you are interested in sponsoring the rest of this Content Series on Personal Finance, please contact our COO Sean Ammirati . Discuss

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How The Web is Transforming Personal Finance

Forget losing weight or finding the perfect life partner: All we want to do is make 2010 the biggest geek-out year ever. The ReadWriteWeb crew have collectively planned to take over the world next year by honing our nerd super-powers. From programming in Python to building AI houses, we’ve resolved to be smarter, more curious, more technical and way geekier than we were last year. Read our resolutions, and definitely let us know what you plan to do to be the best geek you can be in 2010. Sponsor The editor-in-chief himself, Mr. Richard MacManus , is known for his fascination with machine-to-machine communication via the Internet of Things . This year promises to be an interesting one at the MacManus residence if Richard’s resolutions hold true. “One of my goals for 2010,” he said, “is to experiment with Internet of Things in my own house and life, using tools like Pachube and sensors. We’ll see how that goes…” We wish you lots of luck, boss! If all goes well, you’ll be a prime candidate for the first episode of Geek Cribs, and we’ll all be very, very jealous. Our own ReadWriteStart warrior, Dana Oshiro , is going to be a busy bee this year. “I’m finding that the coolest ideas come out of academic institutions and enthusiast groups before they’re ever thought of as business-related products. In 2010 I plan on attending more hackathons,

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2010 New Year’s Resolutions from the RWW Geeks & Friends

While 2009 was a year to keep our noses to the grindstone, many of us let our personal blogs languish in decay. Whether it’s offline or online, it’s never healthy to neglect yourself or those who care about you. One way to turn over a new leaf and keep your community engaged in 2010 is to install community toolbar Wibya . Sponsor Similar to the

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Wibiya Gives Your Blog a Twitter, Facebook and Video Chat Makeover

5 years to the month after it was founded, cross-blog social networking widget MyBlogLog will be closed down by Yahoo! in January, we’re hearing from sources close to the project. MyBlogLog is a service that shows blog writers and readers the faces and profile information of other MyBlogLog users that visit their sites. MyBlogLog was a wildly innovative service that grew fast after launching and was acquired in January 2007 by Yahoo! for $10 million. It made a deal with users: give us your personal information and we’ll show you the faces of people who read your blog. That was a compelling offer and the resulting data amassed could have proven invaluable, had Yahoo! chosen to cultivate it and a developer ecosystem around it. That potential was so great, in fact, that sunset for MyBlogLog is downright tragic. It’s also likely to anger bloggers all around the web. Sponsor In addition to showing the faces of recent blog visitors, MyBlogLog also offered programatic access to activity streams from social networks that users associated with their MyBlogLog accounts. For example, Yahoo’s Kent Brewster, now at Netflix, built a bookmarklet that would display the recent bookmarks on Delicious, photos on Flickr and job titles from LinkedIn of the latest MyBlogLog users to visit any given blog. Yahoo! has let the service atrophy for years and will now put it to rest. To think that this service offered publishers and developers access to personal, demographic, taste and activity data of a website’s readers – and yet that offering has in the end gone no where – that’s downright crazy. Here at ReadWriteWeb we scraped a feed from our MyBlogLog page of the new users just added to our community, then reached out to thank them for their support and welcome them personally. That was just the beginning of what could have been a very valuable source of data. Imagine getting a feed of the LinkedIn job titles of all your recent readers and presenting that to a blog’s advertisers. Both analytically and financially, there was so much potential in MyBlogLog. See our 2008 post The Significance of the MyBlogLog API if you’re a social web geek and want to have your heart broken. Looking at the ecosystems beginning to form around Twitter, Facebook and other user data – MyBlogLog may just have been ahead of its time. The service isn’t alone among potentially world-changing technologies acquired and then starved of support at Yahoo! We’ve asked Yahoo! for comment and will update this post if we receive any. We called co-founder Eric Marcoulier for comment and he offered the following perspective: “So much of your company’s long term sucess when it’s acquired is based on the amount of executive juice it has. The only way it survives and flourishes is if you have an executive champion who promotes it internally. Shortly after we were acquired we were transfered away from our champion and under someone who didn’t feel the same way about MyBlogLog. In those circumstances, things simply slow down. “For any startup that has earn outs, and this didn’t affect us, you’ve got to keep in mind that in 3 months you could be reorganized and the new guy could shut you down. The picture that gets painted early on when you have your product champions can change in a heartbeat and it’s important for entreprenuers to consider that when looking at the deal terms.” R.I.P. MyBlogLog. Discuss

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Yahoo! Will Kill MyBlogLog Next Month

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

Originally posted here:
Server-Side Javascript: Back With a Vengeance