Skip to toolbar

Community & Business Groups

Client and Server JavaScript APIs Community Group

REST seven's rule was "Code on Demand," meaning the ability for the server to deliver code able to run on the client. Some, to use the same code everywhere, tried to do it with Java, .NET (ActiveX). Today, even Flash is fading out to let this place to JavaScript. HTML5 and offline support contributed in the creation of a bunch of APIs which only made sense on server-side in first place: File/FileSystem, Workers, Sockets, Storage/Session, Blob, ImageData. Most of those APIs, and even the already existing XMLHttpRequest (now in version 2) have been designed from the beginning to be usable via either synchronous or asynchronous APIs from the very early stages (synchronous is not blocking any more the user interface in browsers when used in workers). Now that the Server-Side JavaScript is rising again either in synchronous and asynchronous implementations, it is time, if we really want interoperable code/libraries/modules, to make those APIs taking into account the server-side context, and then on the other end, to push Server-Side JavaScript implementations to support them. CommonJS started a great project, it is now time to make its ambitions real.

Group's public email, repo and wiki activity over time

Note: Community Groups are proposed and run by the community. Although W3C hosts these conversations, the groups do not necessarily represent the views of the W3C Membership or staff.

No Reports Yet Published

Learn more about publishing.

Chairs, when logged in, may publish draft and final reports. Please see report requirements.

This group does not have a Chair and thus cannot publish new reports. Learn how to choose a Chair.

Starting activity in Client and Server JavaScript APIs Community Group

This community group wants to provide:

  • a transversal work encouraging W3C API Working Groups to make their specifications:
    • more easily applicable in workers and server-side contexts
    • providing both Synchronous and Asynchronous APIs*
  • a proposal to have a standard web worker like interface in Server-Side JavaScript contexts and maybe define the concept of remote workers
  • evangelisation for having any JS implementation providing as most as possible W3C API (or at least standard ones) instead of proprietary APIs.

You can  start to learn more about this group via those few resources:

More resources will come progressively. We are looking for representative members of most the W3C API (at least) specifications, as well as representative members of server-side (or even desktop) implementations of JavaScript.

* most server-side JavaScript implementations work synchronously, and synchronous code is non-blocking in Web Workers. Synchronous JavaScript code can then work either on the client and the server.