ServerJS: one week into building a better JavaScript

It’s actually been 8 days now since I introduced the ServerJS group. As Peter Michaux mentions in “A Bright Future for Standardized Server-Side JavaScript”, the group has gotten off to an absolutely blazing start. As it stands this morning, there are 224 members who have posted 653 messages in 8 days.

There’s something more important than the numbers, though. Many people who have joined the list are deeply experienced in JavaScript-outside-of-the-browser. Everyone comes along with experience from other programming languages and environments. And all of knowledge and experience is being put to work in figuring out the approaches we want to take with modules, files and binary objects, as just a few starter topics.

You can see some of the work in progress on the ServerJS wiki. Note that the wiki has moved to wiki.mozilla.org.

The interest in server side JavaScript is self-evident, given all of the different projects and frameworks that have grown up around the concept. What’s new here is that these projects are getting together to form a real ecosystem, rather than standalone tools.

I think that better server side JavaScript tools will ultimately help web developers produce better user experiences more quickly, which fits in quite nicely with our goals in the Mozilla Labs web development tools group.

I expect that the coming week will have some even more interesting discussions than the last, so now is a great time to join up if you have ideas on what you want to see in JavaScript as a server side scripting platform.