I’m about to start writing a “server-side” (as in not running in a browser) software that will do a lot of network communication with UDP.
I’m currently leaning towards running the server on Node.js, mostly with the superficial motivation that it’s “new and shiny”.
As I’m fairly new to Javascript, I’m looking into using a some type of JS-framework, to help me avoid a few of the most obvious mistakes one often makes as a beginner. I’m looking for experiences with networking and Javascript. Does any particular framework make UDP-networking really easy/convenient?
Both Mootools and Dojo look interesting as they are both well maintained, while Prototype/script.aculo.us seems to have become stagnant, and aren’t very interesting because of that.
MooTools Server could be a nice add-on to any JS software for its utility methods and OOP layer. However, it would not help in any way to manage specifically UDP.
Actually, all the frameworks you mentioned take their origin from the client-side, and therefore don’t have any reason to manage networking at the transport layer (or beneath) in any way.
It is not a very common use-case since JS, even with Node, is very oriented towards webapp that almost always use HTTP over TCP. I don’t have any references to give regarding such usage, beyond Node’s dgram API. It seems to offer enough abstraction over the datagram to be usable, and I don’t really know what you would like to have to make UDP “easier”: if you’re messing with the transport layer, you’re anyway asking for your hands to get dirty 😉