Month: April 2017

The Node.js Foundation has the following mission:

“…to enable widespread adoption and help accelerate development of Node.js and other related modules through an open governance model that encourages participation, technical contribution, and a framework for long term stewardship by an ecosystem invested in Node.js’ success.”

It’s an entity that guards, grows and promotes node.js (even though it’s not a language we think the same principles of governance apply). An open entity that also brings the community of node.js developer into the development of node itself. People love open source and open governance, being part of it all, and the Foundation offers just that, you can get involved very easily. That means that any Node developer can contribute to future releases, that the community can rally in a single direction. Going strong, forward.

JavaScript also got its own Foundation recently, to unify the ever changing JavaScript ecosystem. The Foundation model goes beyond the JavaScript land, there are several other programming languages that follow a similar model.

Perl: “The Perl Foundation is dedicated to the advancement of the Perl programming language through open discussion, collaboration, design, and code. It coordinates the efforts of numerous grass-roots Perl-based groups, including: International Yet Another Perl Conferences; Carries the legal responsibility for Perl 5 and Perl 6; perl.org; Perl Mongers; PerlMonks.”

Python:“The mission of the Python Software Foundation is to promote, protect, and advance the Python programming language, and to support and facilitate the growth of a diverse and international community of Python programmers.”

But it’s not a general rule, Java is owned by Oracle, who take a different approach to governance, defending Java vigorously even in court when other companies try to use it (see Oracle v Google). Swift is owned and developed by Apple, .net (not a language, but still) is developed by Microsoft Go by Google and PHP is supported heavily the Zend Corporation.

Each of these languages (and not just them) have taken different routes over the years, in development, community involvement, releases and so on. The way they are governed has an impact on them, on the direction they are heading, on the updates that are include and how often they are released.

What do you think of the impact of a Foundation governance on Node.js? Which governance model offers a good direction for programming languages (and not just that: frameworks, runtime environments etc) ?

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Node.js is getting more popular each day as more and more developers are using Node.js in their projects. Considering this we decided to give everyone a hand and list a few Node.js tools that you can use in your work. There’s a vibrant community around Node so we think this list could be very handy and easy to expand, so feel free to add any other tools you know about or have used in the comment section. Let’s grow the community through valuable information and mutual help, these tools can be used by new developer to Node or by the pros. Without any other ado here’s 11 tools to use in Node.js:

1 Sails.js

This tools is great for advanced mobile applications, it’s flexible and makes things work smooth and effortless. It’s very useful for maintaining the coding and easily and for working at a faster pace. It also has a few automations by creating the models and controllers. Overall, creating application is easy as baking a pie with Sails.js.

2 Cylon.js

Cylon.js is a framework created for physical computing and robotics. It has a Unique Command Line Interface to create adaptors and drivers efficiently and great support for Node.js framework. It can also maintain multiple platforms concurrently.

3 Stylus

An awesome development framework packed with lots of great logical functionalities that make your work so much easier.  Stylus has a minimal syntax and it’s very flexible compared to other tools. Also, the logical operations are use to use as they’re very expressive. This preprocessor can be used together with Node.js or JavaScript to build your website faster and more efficiently.

4 Math.js

This extensive math library is great for Node.js and JavaScript. It’s very easy to use and pretty powerful as it’s easy extensible and supports chained operations. Math. js offers a flexible expression parser and an integrated solution that you can use with numbers, units and matrices.

5 Eskimo

Using Eskimo you can build rapidly Node.js apps, APIs, websites and lots more. These are generally known as “igloos”. Because Eskimo is built with open source packages you can use it for almost everything, from simple web pages to referral systems. It also has simple commands bundled with the CLI make it easy to use.

6 Pencil Blue

Pencil Blue is a great management platform for enterprise websites. This Business Class Content Management For Node.js is extendable and easy to use. It has the built in tools to handle multi site hosting, scalable cloud deployments and more.

7 Broccoli

Broccoli is a build tools for Node.js similar in scope to Rails. It offers sub-second compile time no matter with how many files you’re working due to its incremental rebuild system. It’s also very light when it comes to written code due to the wide array of high quality plugins it has, most common tasks take only a few line of code.

8 Taunus

Taunus is a very cool micro isomorphic MVC engine for Node.js. It delivers content to the end user through server-side rendering. It’s basically a great way to deliver a better experience to the user. It can also be used to help view templates independently.

9 Express

Express is minimal, but high performance web development framework for Node.js. After you install it it automatically connects various tools you need so it makes work a lot easier. It has a bunch of robust features for web and mobile apps and loads of HTTP utility methods for quick and easy API build. Express also has layer of web application features.

10 Socket.IO

Socket.IO works on every platform, browser or device and it’s great for bidirectional event-based communication. It works in real time and has document collaboration so you can edit a document concurrently with other members of your team. Main ups for using Socket.IO are a high integration level, binary suport, streamlines API and great debugging.

11 Flatiron

Flatiron it’s a unobtrusive initiative to have a collection of decoupled tools with the same level of quality, all round. It promotes code organization and sustainability through the separation of development concerns. Flatiron also has many more repositories of various useful tools.

Feel free to add any other tools you use or found for Node.js, let’s make development easier for node.js users.

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This year’s Node Summit will take place between July 25-27th at the Mission Bay Conference Center in San Francisco. This is the largest conference focused on Node.js, an event that brings together experts, users and companies that make node.js their core technology. If you want to attend a Node.js conference, this is as good as it gets. If San Francisco is a bit too far away for you, you may be in luck, last year there was a Node Summit Europe in September, hopefully they will have another this edition this year as well. Nothing has been announced so far though.

You can register for Node Summit 2017 NA right now!

The early registration gives you a cheaper price and also a guaranteed spot for the Day Zero session. Day Zero has limited availability, it provides additional talks, workshops and sessions as well as a chance to network with other members.

You can also submit a NodeTalk proposal here and as the schedule is still being put together you can tweet to the organisers (@NodeSummit) on topics that you’d like covered.

The Node Summit conference started out in 2011 as Node.js was getting on the rise. A strong community together with events like these help grow and connect a very important part of any programming language runtime – developers. Node Summit grew, year by year, from a two day track small conference and a 3 hour track at Dataweek 2012 to the event that it is today, spreading over 3 days with talks from developers from Google, Netflix, Mozilla, PayPal, IBM, Microsoft etc.  Its current incarnation of a 3 day track conference during the summer started out in 2015.

More details regarding schedule, talk and presenters will be announced in the coming weeks. Follow Node Summit on Twitter for the latest or check back with them on their website.

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As a platform we present Node.js companies and startups, but we don’t stop there. We want to show Node.js success stories, to build and contribute to the community and inspire developers. As a Node.js developer you are part of this community and you have experiences that are worth sharing.

With that in mind we extend an invitation to all Node.js developers: share your project, share everything you went though to get it done, share your problems, your sleepless nights, share the lessons you learned. It doesn’t matter if it’s a pet project or something more complex. Let’s make this a conversation.

We are opening the BuiltinNode blog to Node.js developers for guest posts. If you are interested in sharing your story on our platform please send us an email at [email protected].

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The Node Foundation keeps a pretty active presence, on various platforms, keeping a level of transparency that’s almost uncommon. Here are a couple of videos that might be worth taking a few minutes out of your day to have a look at. The Node Foundation has a Youtube Channel and they post videos on a pretty regular basis, including their Board of Directors meetings. We talked about the Board a while back, in any case, it’s a useful source of information about the Foundation itself and Node.

They also publish their Technical Committee meetings, LTS meetings and more. If you check out their playlists you can pick and choose what you wanna check out more easily. Some of them are quite long, like the LTS meetings, which go from 30 to 60 minutes, but as a Node.js developer you can actually see how the Node Foundation works, what do they talk about, what are they working on, and this level of communication and transparency is amazing.

Needless to say, there are a gazillion videos out there on Node.js, tutorials, experiences, setups and whatnot, but these videos are a very real glimpses into the way your language is progressing. That might be worth it. Considering that there are tens of thousands of Node.js developers and only a couple hundred views on these videos, some of you might be missing out.

Here are a couple interesting videos from the Foundation:

2017-01-30 Node.js Board of Directors Meeting -i t might seem dull, but you can see and hear how a meeting is conducted and how they work together and make decision for Node.js

Smarter & Cuter Bots by Rachel White, Microsoft – this is a pretty cool presentation from a technical evangelist

Have a look at the channel and see what they have on for you.

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