This past week, we (Oni Labs) announced Conductance, the next-generation web app server built on the StratifiedJS language (which we also built, and which has seen a number of steadily improving public releases over the past couple of years).

For a long time, I’ve been convinced that plan JavaScript is simply inappropriate for building large scale, reliable applications. That doesn’t mean it’s impossible, but the effort required to correctly write a heavily-asynchronous application in javascript involves a frankly exhausting amount of careful error checking and orchestration, and there are whole classes of confusing bugs you can get into with callback-based code which should not be possible in a well-structured language.

So I was extremely happy to join the Oni Labs team to help work on StratifiedJS, because it’s a much more extensive (and impressive) attempt to solve the same problems with asynchronous JavaScript that I was already trying to solve.

Conductance is a logical progression of this work: now that we have StratifiedJS, we’ve used its features to build a new kind of app server: one which maintains all the performance benefits of asynchronous JavaScript (it’s built on nodejs, after all), but which makes full use of the structured concurrency provided by StratifiedJS for both server and client-side code. And not just for nice, modular code with straightforward error handling - but actually new functionality, which would be impossible or extremely ungainly to achieve with normal JavaScript.

If you’re interested in building web apps (whether you already do, or would like to start), please do check out conductance.io for more details, and plenty of resources to help you get started building Conductance applications.