Node.js on Azure or the importance of knowing history

 

Today’s rage on the blogsphere is the news that Microsoft and Joyent are working together in order to have a native windows port of Node.js that will work on Azure (and off course Windows going back to 2003).

For example one of the reports 

Node.js is an implementation that allows you to run javascript on a web server using an evented model (as opposed to a thread one) which is blazingly fast because of it’s evented nature and because it uses V8 (the javascript engine that powers Google’s Chrome) as it’s virtual machine.

This is good news for Azure and it’s one more option for people who are thinking of deploying to Azure but don’t want to use the full Microsoft stack.  Since there are other Cloud vendors that already support Node.js (besides Joyent) Heroku recently announced that it also supports Node.js besides Ruby, this means people have one more cloud provider on their list.

But what bothers me the most on some of these posts, is there are a lot of people saying this means that Microsoft is finally acknowledging that using Javascript on the server is viable (or even possible). People who either don’t know history or are not capable of doing a decent due dilligence process.

Microsoft has supported javascript development on the server as long as I can remember (in a previous life I’ve written thousands of JScript code running on windows 2000). It is supported at least since ASP 2.0 (probably 1.0 but I’m too lazy to check it out). Contrary to popular believe Classic ASP supported out of the box two scripting languages: VBScript and Javascript (in fact it supported any language implementing active scripting, so it could work with things like PerlScript, TCL or Python).

Come on folks it is not that hard to do due dilligence.

As a somehow related note I hear the IronJS is also making good progress as a Javascript implementation running under .NET DLR