Have you noticed that you can right-click a web application project in Visual Studio and convert it to a provider hosted app? Well why not? Basically your own website and a SharePoint manifest is all what you need for a provider hosted app. This discovery today made me think about all legacy web apps out there that can be converted to SharePoint apps.  Traditionally we had to add plain links to external applications or embed them into an IFrame by hardcoding it in an .aspx page or a Page Viewer WebPart. A web application that should be converted to a SharePoint app can be any web app, not only asp.net web site. For a year ago, I had a little nodejs project to try out mongodb and knockout.js: Anvaska which I published as a heroku app:

I know, node.js has been present for a while. But I actually had no time to try it. I was surprised that now it is very straight forward to start with node.js. Allright, everything begins with Hello world. Eventhough it is available for allmost all combinations of operating systems and servers, the easiest way to test it was actually Ubuntu. To install just run:

sudo apt-get install nodejs
```Then make a new directory and create the hello.js:

mkdir hello cd hello vi hello.js

Are you also curious about NoSQL databases. Well, MongoDB is one of the most known ones. MongoDB has a javascript syntax (json), I like it. Try out the interactive shell at the mongodb site.

Quickstart on Ubuntu

To test it on Ubuntu, just install an existing apt-package:

sudo apt-get install mongodb

Create the default folder and change permissions: