NOTEX: Network Oriented Transforms in ECMAScript and XML

Background

It would be nice to run simple web programs on any computer at any time, but this is not possible because of resource and security implications. How can you trust that a program won't consume too many resources or access prohibited files? But if these challenges could be overcome, then you would have a very flexible, powerful and scalable architecture for network-oriented programming.

How NOTEX works

First, you need to have a registered NOTEX username and a user token. These are propagated to all computers that provide the NOTEX service. Now, any computer running the NOTEX service can be used to run your network-oriented JavaScript file. These files contain programs that access special NOTEX JavaScript functions to process network resources. For example, NOTEX provides the function "GET(url)" to read a web page (or data), and the function "write()" to write your own data as output. The NOTEX service only provides safe functions in JavaScript that can't compromise the security of the web server providing the services.

Key advantages

Some key advantages of the NOTEX service are:

• Can scale to run on any number of web server computers
• Data may be read from any web server on the internet
• Simple JavaScript programs can use E4X to process XML data
• JavaScript programs can't compromise your web server security
• Supports REST style programming with GET, HEAD, DELETE, PUT and POST
• Is fairy simple to learn and use right now

An example

Here's an example program:

// Read the Google home page
var html = GET('www.google.com');

// Do some processing here if you like?

// Write it as HTML output
header('-type', 'text/html');
write(html);