Talk at London Node User Group
Tuesday 22 May 2012
Tomorrow (23rd May 2012), I'm speaking about AtomizeJS at the London Node User Group. This will be a talk covering what AtomizeJS is, what problems it solves, why you should use it, and what you can use it for. It would be great to have a good audience, so if you're at all curious about AtomizeJS (or a seasoned user of it!), please come along. Apparently there'll be beers and pizza from 6:30pm!
Over the last few days I've been writing various demos using AtomizeJS for this talk, which has been great as it's exposed lots of bugs (which I've fixed), and again just reinforced that sometimes, hard problems are just plain hard to solve!
Development has been a little slower over the last month as I've been involved in various other projects. I spent an awful lot of time hacking in a security layer for AtomizeJS. All the hooks are now there, so you should be able to implement whatever security policies you want, but it's actually not clear to me how you would want to express such security policies. Or rather, whilst some ideas are fairly attractive to me, managing to achieve them in JavaScript is rather more painful than it ought to be. Having read around the subject, it's clear that since almost no one else tries to solve this problem, it's considered a hard problem. So I've left the hooks in but am yet to try to make a big deal out of it.
The client now has some reconnection logic in it, so if it does lose connection to the server, it should attempt to reconnect. However, currently that's a little buggy because SockJS doesn't expose a disconnect due to packet drops - there's a bug filed and hopefully it should Just Work when the next version of SockJS comes out. Lots and lots of other little bugs have been fixed: it turned out that much of AtomizeJS was broken when writing nodejs-side code as a client of AtomizeJS, but thankfully in developing some demos, that's been exposed, and fixed.