Bingo Node

Much has happened since I last posted here. At $work, a shift has occurred in programming responsibilities and whilst I stilll have lead on the internal LIMs, much of the last few months has been working with Nodejs to produce an analysis framework.

Node uses the v8 engine to run javascript server side, and it's asynchronous nature, and easy use of sockets, makes it perfect to produce an analysis framework for small packet based analysis.

Take info, wrap in JSON packet, pass through socket to new process, process asynchronously enhances packet and pushes through new socket to next new process...

This has been a steep learning curve for me, as I have been primarily a Perl developer with some JS on the client side. Writing purely asynchronous code is very much a change of mind set.

And it works both ways, I was recently helping a colleague with a Perl script which actually would have benefited from being Asynchronous, and I spent a day trying to do that in Perl. (Mind you, I lost count of the amount of times I tried to do synchronous stuff in Node :) Long live the promise module)

Also, we discovered the node-webkit library. This was just fantastic, as we need to be able to deploy a user interface on multiple platforms, and this allows just that, but with everything in done in Node. A standalone application is produced, compiled for Mac, Linux and Windows (one for each).

Now, as we all know, mastership of a skill takes 10,000 hours, and that ain't only gonna happen at work. So I needed a pet project to play with.

Bring in a rewrite of my bingo caller. I have full love for Perl, and the Catalyst/Moose frameworks, but the bingo-caller was a bit slow and clunky. I needed a server and SQL-Lite running in the background. It really needed a rewrite.

I also was thinking of setting myself up as a freelance Bingo caller, as I now have a couple of regular gigs, but the Catalyst app version just won't cut the mustard any more;

So, in a weekend, with a substantially reduced codebase, I got a bingo caller running in Node with node-webkit. It compiles, is now a double click app (my first ever!), and is much much faster. Even putting in the traditional bingo calls hasn't worried the memory usage. There are clear advantages to writing amd running it all in javascript. So, to all involved in NodeJS, and it's many libraries (especially node-webkit), I salute you all.

The code is hosted on GitHub. Versions 0.1/0.2 are under the MIT License, v1.0 is copyright me. I would ask for you to ask permission if you wish to use the caller, but feel free to peruse the code and take hints from it.

github.com/setitesuk/node_webkit_bingo_caller

On a comparison note, I now have 2 real tools for server side programming now, and whilst Perl was my hammer, I now don't need to look at everything as a nail. NodeJS is a great screwdriver, and I can certainly start to identify screws.

If you are interested in hiring a Bingo Caller

https://www.facebook.com/setitesukbingo
twitter.com/setitesukbingo
setitesukbingo@gmail.com