Experimental Node.js Chatserver For IBM i
February 23, 2015 Timothy Prickett Morgan
|
Rainer Ross, the intrepid IBM i developer that we profiled in The Four Hundred a few weeks ago because he had developed a hotel search engine that mashed up the IBM i platform with Big Blue’s Watson cognitive analytics software, has another project he has been working on. And Ross wants to get the word out that all of us need to work to get more applications running on the Power Systems-IBM i combination to ensure the longevity of the platform. First, here is his sense of what we have to do to broaden the appeal of IBM i. “I think, it is very important and a ‘must have’ for the IBM i operating system to be running very cool applications on this box,” Ross wrote in an email exchange with us after we published out initial story. “Today the Web developer community is focused on Intel boxes rather than IBM i boxes. But the IBM i platform is a very good Web server.” One, Ross adds, with the following attributes:
The Node.js JavaScript server framework has been available since December 2014, and Ross took a stab at porting a Chatserver based on Node.js and porting it to the IBM i platform. The code for the Chatserver is available on GitHub if you want to play around with it. The Node.js stack is based on the Chrome V8 JavaScript engine for browsers that has been ported to run on servers. The idea, says Ross, is to be able to build “fast, scalable network applications.” The Node.js runtime has an event-driven, non-blocking I/O model that excels at handling distributed applications that are both data intensive and operating in real time. You can download Node.js for IBM i at this link on IBM’s developerWorks site. Ross recommends running it on a system with Power7 or higher processors and also says to use the built-in Web server that comes with the Node.js stack, not the HTTP Server for IBM i that Big Blue bundles with the operating system. Node.js requires the PASE AIX runtime environment and a bunch of other utilities, including OpenSSH, OpenSSL, zlib functions, IBM Portable Utilities for i, which are bundled together under product number 5770-SC1 in the IBM catalog. The Chatserver requires IBM i 7.1 or higher. “The Chatserver is very simple and non-commercial, but it is a test of using the HTML5-Websockets in combination with a IBM i server,” explains Ross. “I have not tested this with a large number of users, but it is a good idea to do this in IBM’s labs.” If you want to connect with Ross to work on IBM i projects, you can link to him on Xing, which is an analog to LinkedIn. Ross’ Xing profile is at www.xing.com/profile/Rainer_Ross2. If any of you are working on Node.js projects on IBM i, let us know and we are happy to tell the IBM i community about them. RELATED STORIES Demand Building for Node.js on IBM i IBM Delivers Node.js Runtime to IBM i 7.1 and 7.2 App Dev, Database Top IBM i TR9 and TR1 Enhancements
|
