V8 Engine

• V8 is Google’s open source JavaScript engine.
• V8 is written in C++ and is used in Google Chrome, the open source browser from Google.
• V8 implements ECMAScript as specified in ECMA-262, 3rd edition, and runs on Windows XP and Vista,
• Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard), and Linux systems that use IA-32 or ARM processors.
• V8 can run standalone, or can be embedded into any C++ application.

More information here :

• http://code.google.com/p/v8/
• The V8 documentation page which includes instructions on downloading and building V8.
• Performance documentation covering the performance goals of V8, and instructions on how to run the V8 benchmark suite.
• User mailing list: http://groups.google.com/group/v8-users
• The V8 contributor wiki page.

Node.js, JavaScript Server Side framework

Node.js is a javascript Framework that runs server side, it is built on the V8 engine
An example of a web server written in Node which responds with “Hello World” for every request :

var http = require('http');
http.createServer(function (req, res) {
    res.writeHead(200, {'Content-Type': 'text/plain'});
    res.end('Hello World\n');
}).listen(8124, "127.0.0.1");
console.log('Server running at http://127.0.0.1:8124/');

API documentation : http://nodejs.org/api.html
Download : http://github.com/ry/node

Comparaison PHP / JS

http://paul-m-jones.com/blog/?p=236, PHP Helloworld :

Concurrency Level:      100
Time taken for tests:   9.623 seconds
Complete requests:      10000
Requests per second:    1039.13 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request:       96.234 [ms] (mean)
Time per request:       0.962 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)

Helloworld with node.js :

Concurrency Level:      100
Time taken for tests:   2.735 seconds
Complete requests:      10000
Requests per second:    3656.96 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request:       27.345 [ms] (mean)
Time per request:       0.273 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)

Futher reading..

• http://www.desfrenes.com/blog/post/node-js-plus-de-clients-moins-de-serveurs
• http://www.it-wars.com/?article162/developpement-web-avec-node-js
• http://dmathieu.com/fr/d%C3%A9veloppement/introduction-a-nodejs