On Mon, May 28, 2012 at 03:39:15AM -0700, jsalvachua wrote: > We are a group of professors facing new lectures. We are thinking on > changing out network and distributed lectures from java to javaScript > and node.js. > Our point is to use the same programming language on the client and > the server side, appart from getting then involved in new > developments, like node.js. We will starting rewriting all the > teaching of tcp and udp sockets to it. > > Do you know of any experience like this? > Do you think is reasonable?
Yes. It is very reasonable. Node.js is excellent for experimenting with TCP/IP. You can get a meaningful web service up and running quickly, which is incredibly rewarding, possibly a good place to start to demystify network applications, before looking at the details of network programming. There are a lot of resources available to learn JavaScript. Some of your students may already be familiar with JavaScript, because of web development. Java tends to make everything all about Java. There are two network APIs available, so you'd first have to choose which one to teach. If you do teach NIO, do you want to teach thread pools, reactor patterns, etc? Because you need to know *a lot* about NIO in order to do anything meaningful with it. It's a dark art in Java circles. Node.js has lot's of blog entries and Podcasts updated weekly, so students can engage in a platform that is growing. It will be much easier for students to find help with and inspiration for Node.js projects than with Java NIO projects. With Node.js, you can just read the code of popular network client libraries to see real world implementations of network protocols. https://github.com/baudehlo/Haraka https://github.com/mscdex/node-imap https://github.com/mscdex/node-ftp https://github.com/felixge/node-mysql There are open source NIO servers out there for students to look at, but they are enormous, mostly configurations, plugins, and plugin glue. They are difficult to understand. Compare Haraka to Apache James. I can't think of any reason why Java would be a better language for teaching TCP/IP than Node.js and JavaScript. -- Alan Gutierrez - @bigeasy -- Job Board: http://jobs.nodejs.org/ Posting guidelines: https://github.com/joyent/node/wiki/Mailing-List-Posting-Guidelines You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "nodejs" group. To post to this group, send email to nodejs@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to nodejs+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/nodejs?hl=en?hl=en
