Javascript Stack
Spool technology stack is one of the inventions that the spool team has made. It has created a lively platform that allows users to enjoy in a cross platform communication. Before we get to understand how spool technology works, it is important to note that we run an unconventional technology stack- which is JavaScript- at spool.
How the Spool technology stack works
There are complicated processes involved in how the spool technology stack works. It is only complicated to our technical team since the final user will never experience any difficulty in using it. Here below is the process of how it works.
- When a user interacts with one of our clients (Android, iOS, browser add-ons, HTML5 webapp), data requests are sent to our servers.
- On the server, Node.js (javascript webserver built on v8) receives this request and if it needs to read data from our datastore, it sends that request to Redis.
- In Redis, we save key-value pairs. The values are all JSON strings. So Redis just returns JSON to Node.js
- Node.js receives this JSON and passes it down to the client that requested it.
- The HTML5 web client uses backbone.js so we keep the JSON data structures we passed down and quickly & easily generate views from these models.
Advantage:
- The stack is extremely fast. The users will enjoy the fast speed because there is no difference between data and object.
- Jumping between frontend and backend is easy because we only deal with JSON.
- Flexible APIs. This is due to the use of JSON
Disadvantage:
- Analyzing data is a bit tiring since it requires writing scripts. To extract and manipulate JSON, writing scripts are necessary therefore making the process tiring.
- Redis data model is still a big problem to most engineers. They are not well versed with its application and it requires extra skill to successfully run it.
- There is a possibility of running into bugs because of the nascent nature of the ecosystem.
That is a full review of Spool’s full JavaScript stack.