(က) Polpetta, any folder is served spiced

The quick version is: have you ever thought about using node.js to make any folder as a web-server and in a PHPish way where .njs files are required and executed runtime as node modules ?

Oh well, I did, and this is the result in Github: polpetta ... enjoy!

ES6 Harmony Collections Fast Polyfill

Well, just in case you read RSS and you missed my tweet ... everything you need to know in github repository.
Have fun with Harmony Collections

On EventEmitter In node.js

Today I had a whole node.js session and I have spent a bit of time looking at current EventEmitter implementation.
I have twitted already that it sucks as it is, and while it's really trivial to implement the same for any browser, I believe many mistakes have been made about the API. Here the list:

1. on() is a shortcut for addListener but there is no off() as removeListener's shortcut (inconsistent)
2. add/removeListener is not DOM friendly, we cannot reuse an EventEmitter in the browser without double checking if those methods exist
3. removeAllListeners() accepts no arguments and cleans up the whole emitter but there is no way to retrieve all listeners via listeners() passing no arguments (again, inconsistent)
4. there's no possibility to use handleEvent property, as already defined in the EventListener, once again objects are not reusable between client and server
5. no duplicated checks for both addListener and removeListener, this is totally inconsistent against DOM EventTarget plus I found it kinda hilarious since there is also a max number of listeners allowed defined via setMaxListeners method ... if we add same listener twice, it's fired twice ... a non-sense for those coming from the web. We also need to removeListener twice or more 'cause we have no idea if same listeners has been added by mistake twice so ... it's just screwed up, removing a specific listener may be not enough and there is no easy way to check if the listener has been removed or not
6. there is no interface to define events plus the single argument is not a DOM Event like, not even an object with data property and at least a type that points to the event name ... once again, not possible to reuse anything on DOM world

Why All Of This Is Bad

node.js is bringing a lot of non JavaScripters and non browser friendly JS developers into its community and this is the good part. What is absolutely bad is that if node.js won't be minimally aligned with the rest of the code in the browsers out there our life as "one language everywhere" will become harder than ever.
I have personally created wru which runs in all browsers and many server side JS environments but what I would like to avoid is to write twice any sort of test because of weirdly implemented APIs.
If it's about shortcutting, as example, on() and off() are more than welcome but why on earth the long version should be addListener rather than addEventListener?
Why events passed as objects since ever in client JS should be passed as string with optional extra data as second argument?
Where are defaults control over events fired across more listeners?
Why on earth handleEvent is not supported and a listener can be only a function which most likely will require a bind to something else?
Why is it possible to erase all listeners without even knowing "who set them where" but it's not possible to retrieve all of them so that at least we could act accordingly with the event name following some rule rather than "just remove them all" ?

I hope somebody will agree with me, considering flakey points I have already described and changing or improving ASAP this EventEmitter API ... it would be sooooooo coooool to be aligned in both worlds for at least the most used pattern/procedure ever in JS world, don't you say? Thanks for your attention.

implicit require in node.js

playing with Harmony Proxy I came out with a simple snippet:


The aim of above snippet is to forget the usage of require ... here some example:

module.sys.puts("Hello implicit require");

var fs = module.fs;
fs.stat( ... );

It's compatible with nested namespaces too and if there are non JS chars in the middle ... well:

var Proxy = module["node-proxy"];

wru, unit tests have ever been that easy

Do you remember my good old wru project? It has been refactored, readapted for both client and server side environment such node.js and Rhino and, most important, it landed in github ;)

Please spend few minutes to read the documentation and you'll realize why I chose this title for this post.

Have fun with JavaScript Unit Tests!