Posts

Showing posts from September, 2013
Example – EtherCalc I had other plans for the second post on this blog. Fear not, it is just postponed, not canceled. The reason for this is that, few days ago, a friend of mine  +Dusan Jovanovic  sent me a link to EtherCalc web spreadsheet. This project is a nice example of how a legacy application ( VisiCalc ) could be brought to new life on the web platform using node.js . And VisiCalc is epitome of legacy application, but a very important one. It is one of the few that brought computing to the masses and masses to computing. I t would be very nice if you could find the time to read the whole page.
Why node.js It seems that fashion and IT goes round in circles. Not that I care too much about fashion. In the past 20+ years I have been in the IT, many ideas and concepts were “reinvented” and resold to unsuspecting new generations of programmers. In fact, at the time I decided to become one, programmers were called “computer experts”. It still sounds good. In 60's and 70' we had mainframes from the likes of IBM and Sperry Rand Corporation. The function they had back then is practically identical to what we now call Cloud computing. Perhaps it's good that Microsoft did not come up first with that name, and patented it. Otherwise the name would have to be Internet Mainframe or Virtual Machines for Rent Over the Internet. In-between we had good old client-server model. Good old because both client and server were usually written in the same programming language and using the same tool. Visual Studio 6 comes to mind immediately. All you had to do was to drag and