

Erbix: Server-side JavaScript Platform (with JS AppMarket) - vladd
http://www.erbix.com/

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jhrobert
The AppJets people were definitely on something. So it is nice to see that the
idea survives.

I personally go the nodejs way, the asynchronous way, but that's because I
need raw metal level performance. The event based programming model of nodejs
is hard to get right, dealing with concurrent activities is probably harder
than it is already with threads.

PostgreSQL comes preinstalled with Erbix. I hence assume that it is fair to
call Erbix an SQL JavaScript platform.

However, according to the FAQ, "transactions" are not supported yet, this is
puzzling, how is synchronization handled?

I saw no mention of Comet either.

So, I do like the idea but the lack of Comet and SQL transactions seriously
limit the range of addressable applications.

If I were Erbix, I would brand this "alpha" rather than "beta" and implement
Comet & SQL transaction before going to "beta" stage.

However there is value in the "release early, release often" motto, so maybe I
am wrong or maybe I missed something and synchronization issues are dealt with
in some magical way?

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mehi
Thanks for your comments.

We actually have synchronization an transactions. You can execute any SQL
statement, including BEGIN, ROLLBACK and COMMIT. It's just that we haven't
finished the database driver wrapper yet, so you have to handle them manually
for now. I was unclear in the FAQs, will update the page.

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xuhu
Installing the blog right from the marketplace was impressive, non-technical
users will love this.

How about integration with other frameworks ? CommonJS is promissing but I'm
sure RingoJS/NodeJS can't do everything yet.

EDIT: I was thinking of non-javascript frameworks. Apparently the creators are
sticking to a "there is only commonjs" policy so far.

~~~
mehi
It's really easy to port/wrap plain JavaScript code to Erbix/CommonJS; this is
the first thing we've noticed while coding on Erbix Blog/Form
Creator/ActiveRecord (included in Blog, a port from TrimPath Junction).

One other example si UnderscoreJS, the library is already "ported"; this code
does the trick: if (typeof exports !== 'undefined') exports._ = _;

<http://documentcloud.github.com/underscore/>

We would welcome your suggestions on the frameworks you want us to take a look
into.

~~~
jashkenas
It's nice that it already "just works" -- here's a direct link to the bit of
code in question:

[http://documentcloud.github.com/underscore/docs/underscore.h...](http://documentcloud.github.com/underscore/docs/underscore.html#section-9)

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vladd
We're using RingoJS under the hood (a server-side JavaScript engine similar
with NodeJS --they're both CommonJS compliant) and provide integration with a
browser-based editor, online hosting and a marketplace with e.g. two GPLed
server-side JS apps, Form Creator and Erbix Blogs (which we've launched today
- you can find more details about the announcement at
[http://groups.google.com/group/ringojs/browse_thread/thread/...](http://groups.google.com/group/ringojs/browse_thread/thread/f762405a7c2e9c05)
).

We wanted to do a rate-our-startup on HackerNews for some time to get feedback
for pivoting the next iteration of Erbix as a JavaScript platform. Due to
today's launches, it looks like a good time to request some feedback and what
you'd like to see next from us.

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js4all
Great Job. I tried the apps from the market place. Everything runs flawless.
Anybody seems to have a market place these times and I really like the idea :)

For those who don't know the AppJet web framework, which was mentioned several
times. It is still hosted here: <http://apps.jgate.de>

