Google’s Chrome Browser Sprouts Programming Kit of the Future
Chito Manansala is the reason you and about 2 billion other people can instantly pay with a Visa card in shops across the planet.
As chief system architect at Visa, Manansala designed the communications system at the heart of VisaNet — a worldwide network of shops, ATMs, banks and websites that handles 130 million payments a day. In other words, he knows how to build a contraption that juggles ridiculous amounts of information with each passing second.
In 2007, after leaving Visa, he joined Sabre, the company behind the online travel agency Travelocity. At Sabre, Travelocity is just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. The company offers all sorts of software that shuttles information among travel agencies, airlines, hotels and other tourism outfits across the globe, and Manansala was hired to build a system that would drive applications running on a world of mobile phones. Think of it as the VisaNet of travel reservations.
At first, he built this system using the venerable Java programming language. But he has since dropped Java and switched to what is widely regarded as The Next Big Thing among Silicon Valley developers. He switched to Node.
Node is short for Node.js, a new-age programming platform based on a software engine at the heart of Google’s Chrome browser. But it’s not a browser technology. It’s meant to help build software that sits on a distant server somewhere, feeding an application to your PC or smartphone, and it’s particularly suited to systems like the one Chito Manansala is building — systems that juggle scads of information streaming to and from other sources. In other words, it’s suited to the modern internet.
Two years ago, Node was just another open source project. But it has since grown into the development platform of the moment. At Yahoo!, Node underpins “Manhattan,” a fledgling online service for building and hosting mobile applications. Microsoft is offering Node atop Windows Azure, its online service for building and hosting a much beefier breed of business application. And Sabre is just one of a host of big names using the open source platform to erect applications on their own servers.
“There’s real developer excitement over Node, but there’s also real benefit to using it for at least certain types of applications,” says Bill Hilf, the general manager of product management for Windows Azure. “We don’t see Node on Azure as altruistic. We see it as a way to drive business.”
For Gerad Suyderhoud — who helped organize the first Node hackathon in the summer of 2010 — Node is the successor to Ruby on Rails, the programming framework that made it big when Twitter made it big. “First there was C, which Amazon was written in,” he told us this past spring. “Then there was Perl, and Craigslist was written in Perl. Then there was PHP and Facebook, and then Rails and Twitter. With each of these things, they solved a lot of hard problems, but then new problems arrived. Node solves the next set of hard problems, the problems that come with all this real-time stuff.”
And he’s not alone. This week, in downtown San Francisco, Joyent — the chief steward of the Node open source project — is hosting the first major conference dedicated to the technology, and the speaker lists includes names from likes of Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft, VMware, and Mozilla.
Javascript Breaks Out
The js stands for Javascript. Node.js is a new way of programming with the web’s standard programming language. Not to be confused with Java, Javascript is the code that runs inside your browser when you use web applications such as Google’s Gmail.
Node is based on the Javascript engine at the heart of Google’s Chrome browser — the engine that executes Javascript code. But it takes Javascript out of the browser and moves it to a new place. The trick with Node is that developers can also use Javascript to build the back-end of an application — the part that runs on a server somewhere. With Node, all those developers who know how to build code for the browser can suddenly build stuff for the server too — at least in theory. It seeks to democratize net programming.
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