Until now, QEWD has made use of Express and socket.io to provide its outward-facing HTTP(S) and WebSockets interface. A recent benchmark test came to my attention, which highlighted the fact that the performance of these two dependent technologies is not exactly leading-edge. One of the alternatives to Express that performed very well in the benchmark – […]
Removing the Technical Limitations and Developer Complexities of Node.js Imagine all the benefits of Node.js: one language and technology for both front-end and back-end development, plus its outstanding performance; BUT without the concerns of concurrency and heavy CPU processing, AND with high-level database abstractions: with some interesting parallels to Amazon Web Services’ Lambda, that’s what […]
Today I’m announcing the latest evolution in my EWD products. I’m calling it EWD 3. Unlike the original “legacy” “server-pages” version o EWD (EWD 1) and the Node.js-based EWD.js (EWD 2), EWD 3 isn’t a single product, but a suite of Node.js modules, each of which does just one specific job. The core EWD […]
One of the underlying rules of using Node.js is that all operations that involve external resources should be non-blocking, and therefore handled asynchronously. The reason is that Node.js JavaScript code runs as a single thread, and if that code is handling the simultaneous activities of lots of users, then anything that blocks this thread would […]
It’s not often I discover a new framework or technology and get immediately excited about it. Often that’s because the technology in question will either seem to me to be a solution to something I don’t perceive to be a problem in the first place, or because in addressing one problem, the technology introduces a […]
What Are Micro-Services? Micro-Services are the latest big buzz in the web and browser-based application development world. As with many buzzwords in IT, the term is somewhat vague and difficult to specifically pin-point, but it’s worth reading the definitive paper by Martin Fowler on the subject: http://martinfowler.com/articles/microservices.html In a nutshell, Micro-Services are all about moving […]
I’ve seen this question posed about EWD.js, something along the lines of: Why should the VA and others put their faith in and backing behind EWD.js, a framework developed and supported by a small UK company, when there are plenty of well-known and community-supported Node.js frameworks for web application development? I’d like to try to […]
The US Department of Veteran’s Affairs (VA) has embarked on an initiative known as VistA Evolution, the goal of which is to create a new generation of their Electronic Healthcare Record (EHR) that will be known as VistA4. The aims of this initiative are entirely laudable: to modernise the ageing, but much loved and […]
For those who are interested in learning EWD.js, particularly in relation to modernising VistA, I’m running a course in Fairfax VA just before the WorldVistA Community Meeting: this 3-day comprehensive course runs from Friday 30th May until Sunday 1st June, 2014, and will be held at George Mason University. You can register by clicking here. […]
I described how Google’s Chromecast device works in my previous article. In this article, I’ll explain how to use the new Chromecast extensions for EWD.js to build your own Chromecast applications. Preparation The first thing you’ll need to do is install EWD.js or, if you’re already using EWD.js, update it to Build 54.10 or later. […]
The EWD Files 