Posted by Maarten Winkels in the early evening: June 23rd, 2011
Tonight in one of our knowledge exchange sessions, one of my colleagues challenged us to writing a TagCloud in JavaScript. He had prepared a nice setup with a server producing twitter hashtags over a WebSocket to the browser and using Processing.js to produce a graphical representation of the tags zooming by on twitter. Since he had already done all the heavy lifting in integrating all these fancy new frameworks, what was left to do, you might ask. Well, we still needed to implement the algorithm to count the number of tags on the continuous stream, sorting this list on the bases of the counts and making sure the system wouldn’t run out of memory by removing less used tags in some smart way. His point to all of this was, that although JavaScript is being prophesized in some circles as the new-old-new language of the future, writing and testing a non-trivial algorithm in it is a big challenge.
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