

Show HN: Fire.js: Visual Node.js Development with JSON, MongoDB and Cloudfoundry - thepumpkin1979
http://firejs.firebase.co/post/13823060173/this-is-an-introductory-video-to-the-basic

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thepumpkin1979
Author here. I'm not a native english speaker, so I apologize if you you can
understand some of the things I say. Slides available here:
[http://www.slideshare.net/thepumpkin/introduction-to-
firejs-...](http://www.slideshare.net/thepumpkin/introduction-to-firejs-alpha)

Any feedback will be highly appreciated :)

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nodesocket
Looks interesting, wish the video has been uploaded in HD, its a bit difficult
to see.

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cosmic_shame
you can only watch it in HD on vimeo

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thepumpkin1979
interesting, thanks. I edited the post to include this info.

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mhseiden
This, in concept, really epitomizes an unfortunate trend towards making
programming and development "easier" and "more accessible".

As I see it, this is no longer "Node.js, JSON, MongoDB, and Cloudfoundry". It
certainly uses all of those technologies, but in reality, you are learning
"Fire.js".

Even with a polished version, it doesn't seem like a developer would ever
learn how to use the underlying technologies in an expressive, applicable
manner. It just comes off as another excuse for developers to side-step
learning about and getting into "the thick of it".

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bprater
I'm seeing zero information on what this software does, even when quickly
scanning the homepage -- therefore, I'm hardly ready to commit 15 minutes to
watching a video. What is Fire.js?

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thepumpkin1979
yeah, sorry about that, I guess I didn't spend enough time to create a landing
page or something. If you want to give it another try, can you jump to minute
10:58? :)

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jimrhoskins
I only watched the first few minutes of the video, then skipped around. What
is the benefit of fire, as a framework? Can you work without the Fire IDE, and
would that be worth it?

I just can't see giving up my text editor to click around a web interface to
write code. It just seems orders of magnitude slower to me.

It looks cool and I appreciate the effort, I just have a hard time figuring
out the benefit of fire to me as a developer.

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thepumpkin1979
Makes sense, I guess I didn't focused the video to explain what it solves, my
bad. Well the goal is to make it easy the development of Node.js application
when you work with a lot of asynchronous operations, which turns to be like
90% of the work you do in Node.js. Because Node.js works in a asynchronous
way, so you have to write a lot of callbacks to work with the results when
they are available, Fire.js uses JSON documents to define the behavior you'd
have to write in plain javascript. With fire.js you don't have to write
callbacks, just put expression calls in a JSON block one after the other.

{ "@DoThis": null, "@ThenDoThat":null }

Under the hood everything will be async.

If you want to give it another try, load the video at minute 10:58 and I will
try to explain what it does and how it does it :)

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jimrhoskins
Cool, thanks for the tip, I watched the video. It looks like you're doing some
cool stuff, but it doesn't look appealing to me as a developer who is already
comfortable with node.

The biggest mental leap for me is that you are using JSON objects to define
sequential code. JSON defines an object as unordered. Obviously your compiler
maintains order properly, however it just "feels wrong".

Like I said there is no way you can convince me to write code in a browser
(unless there is an absolutely magical benefit), so writing fjson manually
looks difficult both in the amount of extra syntax, as well as trying to
connect the data to what it's doing.

The last thing that would hold me back is the debugging experience. Will i get
back which lines im my documents are causing runtime errors, is there any
static checking in place to make sure the strings of code are syntactically
correct?

It's a big leap for me, but that being said, I definitely applaud you for
developing something new and experimenting. I'm interested in seeing where
this evolves.

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thepumpkin1979
Thanks. I understand you perfectly, in fact, JSONScript is not a replacement
for Javascript, it just make it easy to develop server side API's without
having to dealing with Javascript. I found it perfectly suitable for those
Android and iOS developers that have to use persistence services like
parse.com or stackmob.com just to persist simple server side data. As the
number of ignitable modules(node.js modules designed to be used by the fire.js
Runtime) grow up, then less javascript those developers have to write.

I'm also improving the error reporting for the stable version, it's kinda hard
to figure out where the error occurred in this alpha version.

btw, you can develop without the IDE, there is a command line utility called
'firejs' that you can use to launch the apps. If you want to know more, check
the tutorials. <https://github.com/firejs/fire/wiki/Tutorials>

Thanks for your comment jim :)

