Re: What are your plans for node.js? How does npm work?

On Thu, Jan 29, 2015 at 11:26 AM, Vicki Wilson <VWilson@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

1) In general I'm wondering what thoughts/plans folks have for using node.js on the i? I'm thinking of a dashboard for monitoring.

Personally, I am a fan of dynamic languages in general. My language
of choice is Python, and I do use it extensively on the i, but it's
not officially supported, endorsed, or even recognized by IBM. So to
me, node.js represents the closest thing to "official IBM i
JavaScript". So JavaScript joins the ranks of PHP and Ruby as
official IBM i dynamic languages.

How do I use dynamic languages? Well, I use Python for almost
everything. Record-level file access, SQL file access, anything
having to do with IFS stream files, serving or consuming Web services,
RPC, Excel reading and writing, scripting sys-admin-type tasks, the
list goes on.

It's easier to tell you what I *don't* use dynamic languages for:
Driving green-screen display files. And... um... yeah, that's pretty
much it.

2) Is trying to use some of the open source solutions for node.js going to work on the i? We are not actually allowed out of our firewall on the i. So my second question shows how green I am. I've done just enough Ruby on Rails (not on the i) to think I understand that gem installation reaches out to the web to pick up the code. Does npm with node.js work the same way? Will I be able to work around not being able to go out through the firewall?

npm and virtually any modern package management system works the same
way: They all go to the Internet to get what they need. But you can
work around this for any "pure" package (i.e. the package consists
entirely of, in this case, JavaScript code, and has no external
dependencies). It should just be a matter of manually copying the
package's source code to an appropriate place in the IFS.

John Y.