SSJS: powerful and full-featured, not so forgiving [Part 2]

Webcrossing's second scripting language is server-side JavaScript (SSJS), sometimes referred to Webcrossing JavaScript (WCJS). What Web Crossing did along around version 3 was add support for the Mozilla Spidermonkey implementation of JavaScript.

JavaScript isn't usually thought of as a server-side language, but it's really quite rich and powerful on its own, and coupled with the OODB, you can do some really cool things. Since it's tightly tied to the object-oriented database (OODB), it's trivial to set properties on built-in forum objects.

Like WCTL, SSJS starts with the concept of "location" as the forum object at which the script is being run. From there, you can look up any other objects you want to work with. Any properties you set are automagically just saved in the database.

var someMessage = Stored.lookup( uniqueId );
someMessage.lastEditor = somebody;

But, unlike WCTL, you aren't stuck with a single current location. You can have as many Node objects available as you like:

var theFirstFolder = Node.lookup( uniqueId );
var theSecondFolder = Node.lookup( uniqueId );
var theThirdFolder = Node.lookup( uniqueId );

From there, you can do whatever you like with the first, second, and third folder objects you have open.

Same with users - no user/author dance like with WCTL.

var someUser = User.open( uniqueId );
var someOtherUser = User.lookup( name );

You can also create your own new object types based on the built-in primitive forum objects, prototype them as you see fit, and store them in the database.

As you can see, SSJS is really just plain old JavaScript, but there are some special methods added just for use within Webcrossing, like the $( someproperty ) hierarchical property-fetcher, date formatting methods, and more.

But SSJS might not be the best for beginners without any programming experience: as you would expect from a "real" programming language which is CaSe sensitive, has arrays and more than one variable type, and has functions with parameters, there is more than a small learning curve.

If you don't program defensively, it tends to throw up errors all over the page, but on the bright side, you get a really nice helpful stack trace for each error. Every bit of HTML going to the page needs to be quoted, which can eat up some time, and getting complex client-side JavaScript quoted and escaped just right in server-side JavaScript can be a bit of a nightmare sometimes.

Some of us swear by SSJS, some of us swear at SSJS, and all of us use it at least part or most of the time. When you need the power and flexibility of a real programming language, want to create and prototype your own objects, have to do something with multiple locations or users at once, or need to do some serious number crunching, SSJS is for you.

We covered the Webcrossing Template Language (WCTL) in Part 1, and Part 3 will summarize what the two languages are each best and worst at.