Stratified JavaScript in the Oni Rocket Web Server

It's been a while since I blogged about Stratified JavaScript - "an experiment that allows us to play with some concurrency features in JavaScript in a cross browser way", as ajaxian.com explained it.

Encouraged by the results of this experiment, I have since teamed up with my ex-Joost colleague Tom Germeau to found a startup, Oni Labs, where we are taking the "stratified" idea further.

Our product, "Oni Rocket", is an asynchronous JS web server similar to nodejs, with the big difference that Rocket can be programmed in a more structured, callback-less 'stratified' way. Like nodejs, we use Google's V8 JS engine under the hood.

On top of the web server we've also implemented a web application framework which uses both client and server-side Stratified JavaScript to make coding web applications a pure joy. SJS enables things like CommonJS's module system on both client and server and makes non-blocking bi-directional client-server communication very natural and easy. The framework also includes "Oni Surface", a small JS UI toolkit implementing cross-platform box layout, but of course everything is also fully compatible with existing frameworks like jQuery UI or ExtJS.

It's all still a bit rough around the edges and won't be ready to be released for another couple of months. In the meanwhile, here is a short video showing how easy it is to code a little comet chat app in Rocket:

Belorussian translation provided by PC.