The Surge

Seeing as today seems to be the one month adversity of jsapp.us, it seems only fitting to have a small reflection on what has changed and happened over the last month or so.  When I first started announcing Jsapp.us, I was doing it through the node.js irc room.  In fact it was from a conversation that I had in irc, where I got the idea to add the sidebar.  I think that this sidebar greatly helped people understand some of the capabilities of the system rather then just seeing a coding editor.

Within the first week of jsapp, it was on the reddit/programming page and hacker news.  This is a graph of the bandwidth that the site was using during this time.  The smaller section is about 24 hours after it started on reddit.  And the larger spike is getting onto the hacker news page for about 3 hours.

During this time of rapid growth, most of the actions only dealt with running the test of node.  From the comments that I was reading, a large number of people had been wanting to try node out but found it to be somewhat difficult to get up and running on a windows box.

Now that the number of people coming to the site has died down, the deployment system is getting used more as more and ore people are getting use to the idea having a web editor and being able to deploy their apps.

There have also been some features added to the system after its initial upstarting.  First there is now support for an http client. before this was just left blank and was not working.  There is also a profile view, in which all user have a profile that they can write content in, and view their applications and shared files.  Along with the profile view there is now support for importing files from other users when they have made said file public.  This can make it convent by not having to load in ones own version of the library to their own file system to use it.

Some stats: In the first month there were 500 accounts created, 100 applications deployed, and 20,000 visits

Large update JsApp.US

Today I pushed out a large number of updates for JsApp.us.

First there are a few new features that everyone should know about: (these first two should sound like what appjet was before it closed)

  • People can make libraries public to be imported by other people using the service.  To make a file public see the files command and click the public link.
  • There is a new profile view that is convenient place with links to all of the users applications deployed as wells as all public files so that others can shop around for the modules they are looking for. (Self promotion: http://jsapp.us/p/matthewfl)
  • There is also a share command that few people have discovered, it allows one to share a current version of a files, this is greatly useful for things such as writing blog entries about node.js or getting help with something that is not working.
  • And finally JsApp.us is now open source at github, so if you find a bug that you want fixed, or want to build the next cool feature fork it

JSApp.US

It seems a little strange that I have not yet written a blog entry on my own project JSApp.US

For those that do not know what it is, it is a platform to write applications quickly in Javascript using the node.js platform and then quickly deploy these applications to the web.  To some extent this is my attempt to relive the days of appjet, but with a new and more powerful platform.

At it stands now, it is my most popular site ever, it laded its self to the reddit/programming page, and was on the top of hackernews for about 3 hours.  It seems to be very successful for now and even I have a few applications that are using it, such as count.jsapp.us, it is powering the little visitor count that I have placed on the side bar.

There are a few new features that I am still planing to implement.  The first feature is going be a sorta profile that will allow for people to “show off” their applications that they have on JSApp.US.  I also have plans to make it so that one can require in files from other users.  This should end up like how github handles it with users, the basis will look like: require(‘other_user/file.name’).