By now I have gone through a number of Elixir web frameworks, a web framework in Cocoa, and not really been able to release my homepage in a way that I liked. So what would be more natural than to drop the code and try something else, perhaps something that I’ve worked on before and found wanting? Hello Node.js (+Express & CoffeeScript).

One of the issues I’d had last time I worked with Node.js was that debugging was hard, or console.log based. This time I found that someone had made a Eclipse distribution with Node.js support. Turns out, syntax highlighting and debugging CoffeeScript is still flaky. But I can step through most of the dependencies I use, so that helps, and a lot more people are using this, thus searching the net for solutions is better. Stuff I’m really missing from the earlier approaches, though, are

  • the actor model
  • GCD or other nice threading
  • a crash only being local to a piece of the code and being restorable

What was really nice, was that I got up to where I’d been in both Elixir and in Cocoa fairly quickly. Also, I have a feeling I will be able to complete it this time. ;-) So onwards we go, at least writing posts is quick and easy with the approach I’ve tried to enforce through these different implementations. And that, after all, is where I expect to have my “big win” when my page has finally been deployed.

Categories: Technology Blog