Back in October, IBM announced that another open-source JavaScript language would be available on the IBM i. And it has been generating a great deal of excitement in the IBM i developer community.
Node.js is an open-source server-side JavaScript runtime engine, which has, since mid-November been supported on both the IBM i 7.1 Technology Refresh (TR) 9 and IBM i 7.2 TR1.
In their announcement back, Big Blue said:
“Besides the core functions of node.js, IBM i node.js also offers extensions to operate DB2 for i and access native IBM i objects such as programs, commands, data queues, data areas, spool files, user spaces, jobs, system values, environmental values, and more.”
Node.js for i, as IBM calls the tool runs in parallel to the Apache Web server. As many developers are, we have been leveraging JavaScript for the web-side for a while, but it is the opportunity of running JavaScript server-side that is so exciting in this latest development.
On the Node.js website, the platform is described as:
In his latest blog, Node.js on IBM i Tim Rowe, business architect for application development on IBM i says:
‘Long term, you will be able to reuse code across both environments. One of the other huge benefits of Node.js, is its ability to work in a non-blocking event-driven environment. It provides a very lightweight and efficient way to deal with data-intensive real-time applications.”
Node.js joins the stable of open source tools that are available in the IBM i, which includes PHP, MySQL and Ruby on Rails.
You can find further information on Node.js for i on the IBM Developer Works wiki page.
If you are interested in more information on software technologies, why not read Chris Mann’s blog post earlier in the year entitled Programming languages, databases and software libraries: adopting new technologies for software development.
Posted by Paul on 16th December 2014.