How to run javascript file on the server side? - javascript

Suppose I have server. A client loading an HTML file containing a javascript library will have the script executed by the browser. The problem here is that if the client's computer is slow, the processing will take a long time.
So I want to move the processing to the server side. But, instead of having to rewrite the entire javascript library into another language, I simply want to run the javascript on the server.
Googling "server side javascript" directs me to Node.JS, which in my imagination have the capability to do so. But, I cannot find a tutorial which does just that. Does this mean that there really is no easy way to do so? For example, because the javascript script may contain DOM specific things such as document.getElementById(), which does not make much sense on the server side.

There is no trivial way to simply shift processing of JS from the client to the server.
You need to break the code down into code that must run on the browser (such as, assuming you don't want the browser to load an entirely new page, DOM manipulation) and code that can run on the server.
Then you need to provide a way to pass data between the server and the browser, this is normally done via HTTP (using Ajax).
When you take input from the client you need to send it to the server in an HTTP request (instead of just passing it as an argument to a function). The server needs to read the HTTP request, process it, and make an HTTP response.
The Ajax callback then needs to parse the response and run any client side logic (such as DOM updates) in response.
Note that network communication times will impact performance.

You can't "merge" the client and server in this way. All you could do is process the data on the server and just display it in the client without any further processing. Maybe you should refresh you knowledge about HTTP and how websites are send to the clients. Without any additional tricks, like websockets, comet or ajax polling, you can't access the client after you send the initial website to it. Even than you can just send data to the client.
When you want to stick to Javascript, Node.js is a good option. But even than you would need to send the data you want processed to the server, process it there and send back the processed data in JSON or "display ready" HTML.

Related

Client access vs broadcast data from web server

I'm looking for technique or skils to fix the ways for new web site.
This site show the read time data which located on server as file or data on memory.
I'll use Node.js for server-side. But I can't fix how to get the data and show that to web site user.
Because this data have to update per 1 second at least.
I think it is similar to the stock price page.
I know there are a lot of ways to access data like AJAX, Angular.js, Socket.io..
Also each has pros and cons.
Which platform or framework is good in this situation?
This ultimately depends on how much control you have over the server side. For data that needs to be refreshed every second, doing the polling on client side would place quite the load on the browser.
For instance, you could do it by simply using one of the many available frameworks to make http requests inside some form of interval. The downsides to this approach include:
the interval needs to be run in the background all the time while the user is on the page
the http request needs to be made for every interval to check if the data has changed
comparison of data also needs to be performed by the browser, which can be quite heavy at 1 sec intervals
If you have some server control, it would be advisable to poll the data source on the server, i.e. using a proxying microservice, and use the server to perform change checking and only send data to clients when it has changed.
You could use Websockets to communicate those changes via a "push" style message instead of making the client browser do the heavy lifting. The flow would go something like:
server starts polling when a new client starts listening on its socket
server makes http requests for each polling interval, runs comparison for each result
when result has changed, server broadcasts a socket message to all connected clients with new data
The main advantage to this is that all the client needs to do is "connect and listen". This even works with data sources you don't control – the server you provide can perform any data manipulation needed before it sends a message to the client, the source just needs to provide data when requested.
EDIT: just published a small library that accomplishes this goal: Mighty Polling ⚡️ Socket Server. Still young, examine for your use if using.

How to verify that Javascript on client has not been altered

Is there any way to verify that the javascript file as loaded (and potentially altered) by the client has not been tampered with by a malicious user?
I'm thinking of something like this:
1) Computing a checksum and sending this for the server for verification
2) Sending the file as it is in browser memory back to the server for comparison/checksumming.
Is anything like this possible? How can you verify the integrity of the executed javascript given a known-good copy on the server?
tl;dr No
As a malicious use can easily tamper with the data getting sent to the server there's no way of securely verifying that the Javascript has not been altered. Even if you did hashsum calculations there's no way of making sure that the user is not modifying that hashsum before sending it to the server.
You simply have to find other means to make your solution secured. Usually this mean that you've to run your business logic on the backend rather than on the client.
I don't think there is a good solution for this, simply because even your checks to the server could be manipulated client side, I could easily change the checksum to the original one and send that one to your server.
Keep the validation on the server, never store or use key variables / data in the browser. You should use JavaScript to process the received data and interact in the UI. The only thing people could do is change the values shown to the eye.

Javascript send string to console application

I want to execute some javascript that will send a string of text to a c++/java console application running on the same machine as the web browser
What javascript should I execute? and how should I receive the string?
As far as I know, there are two ways to transmit data to somewhere else using JavaScript. The first is using an XMLHttpRequest, the second is using a WebSocket. In both cases, the JavaScript code will establish a connection to another program, which in this case you want to be your C++/Java program.
In the first case, if you want to communicate using an XMLHttpRequest (or other libraries that use this, such as jQuery's get or post), you'd need to make sure that your C++/Java application starts a small webserver. This way, the JavaScript code can establish a connection to it and send data. I'm sure there are C++/Java libraries which you can use for this, but even if you can't it should be fairly simple to get something to work with just plain socket code. The text-based HTTP protocol that you need for this is not that difficult.
In the second case, you'd need to make sure that a WebSocket server is started in your C++/Java application. Your JavaScript code then can connect to this server and just send its data. I'm not that familiar with the WebSocket protocol but I suspect that it's slightly less trivial, so using a library for this would be a good choice.

Event based Ajax communication between server and browser

I'm going to write an application, having some worker threads on the server, and some log and status elements on the html page. logs and status are expected to be updated whenever an update is ready from the server side.
well, one approach is to set up a polling mechanism, like the client sends a request on specified intervals and the server sends back the last update, (if any available).
however I wonder if there is any more efficient way like an interrupt-driven approach, on which whenever an update is ready on the server a message is sent to the client through an Ajax call. and as long as no update exists no message is transferred back and forth.
first of all, is this possible to initiate a call from the server side? I mean via Ajax.
or is there any library like JQuery that facilitates such a requirement?
Thanks
Consider using web sockets (Available in HTML5) - This will allow you to skip polling an update the data immediately as the server sends up his finish request.
Read more on:
http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/websockets/basics/

Cross Domain requests using JQuery

This is a followup question to the one here
Here's briefly what I am trying to do. The File server creates a text file to indicate an end of the process. On a webpage on the Web Server, I loop every x seconds and make an ajax request to find out if the test file exists (ajax request to http://fileserver/files/UserFile.txt)
I've tried the following approaches so far:
Trigger a web method from the client side that creates a HttpContext object to verify if the text file exists. But this is too strenous on the server and I started getting all kinds of exceptions in the Event Viewer.
YQL works great but unfortunately it's too slow. The user waits atleast twice the amount of time.
I am looking for a solution that doesn't involve the server side. Somehow, I'd like to use JQuery to verify the existence of a text file on the fileserver.
Any thoughts?
You should be able to use JSONP and JQuery.ajax() to do cross-domain request work. Play with the jsonp and jsonpCallback attributes. Alternatively, you can use JQuery.getJSON().
Serving a single file from the filesystem is the most simple operation a web server can do. If that is already too much, then all other solutions will be worse. Find out why the server takes so long to serve a simple file and fix that.
Note: I'm assuming that the file is small since you say "test file". If it's a big file, the server will actually send it to the client which will need a lot of resources.
What you can try is to add an ASP page to the web site which runs code on the server that checks whether the file is there and just returns a tiny piece of HTML which you can add to the page with jQuery.load().
I may be miles off base here but... could you not create ONE asynchronous (!) Ajax client request with a HUMONGOUS timeout. Fire it, and wait. You would be invoking some server script that checks every so often, in a loop on the server (using sleep in between), whether the file exists. And not replying to the Ajax request until the file finally shows. The server script then replies and exits.
EDIT: Depending on the server-side scripting framework used, you may even get some OS support. You may be able to sleep on a status change in the directory...

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