RPC in NowJS is achieved through function stubs. The "client function" that gets run on the server is just a stub function that tells the client to run its own version.

Code is only executed on the machine on which it was defined. There is no toString or eval going on here.

Are there any other libraries that do this? Wouldn't this be fairly trivial to code up utilizing socket.io? Just curious as to what is unique about now.js

Why does this have "post mortem" in the title? It is so misleading. Whenever I read "post mortem" in a title I immediately think somebody or something has died (possibly metaphorically). In this case I expected the article to be about an abandoned (dead) project. It was a very confusing read.

Maybe it's because English isn't my native language and the Latin meaning just makes a lot more sense to me.

"Post mortem" as a noun in English is short for "post mortem examination." It does refer to examining a dead body, but it's a common term in software development as well. It refers to the process of going over a completed project and figuring out what went right and what went wrong.

Jeff Atwood wrote an essay on it a while back if you want to read more about it: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2006/11/the-project-postmor...

No, the Latin and English meanings are the same. It isn't 100% clear what the author thought he was saying, though he probably meant a debrief (as guessed by OP).

hmmm, I suppose I've always associated it with some manner of debriefing, i.e. a mission post mortem. But, to avoid confusion I've updated the title.

Edit: Nevermind; see chc's comment.

HAProxy is easy to set up and is probably what he wants, if he plans to scale to multiple machines. But on those machines I'd recommend cluster.js. (http://learnboost.github.com/cluster) It will spawn n child workers, proxy requests to them, and restart them if they die.

It's worth mentioning that clustering will also be built into Node.js 0.6.0 which is being released in the coming week according to the official blog.

Don't know if it's as extendable and pretty as TJ's cluster though.