Built In Node

Last year we did a few stories on how big brands moved from different technologies to Node.js. The stories caught on quite well in the Node community as people got excited about the takeover of node.js. More and more companies take in node.js in the fold of their respective technologies, and quite a few are changing technologies towards node.js. When one side wins, the other loses, Java lost in PayPal and Netflix when they switched technologies to Node.js and Ruby on Rails lost when Groupon and LinkedIn moved to Node.js.

That doesn’t mean that Java Or Ruby on Rails are going extinct or losing footing, it means that for a particular service Node.js was a better choice. That’s the thing, any technology can be replaced, even Node.js. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. In the case of Linkedin, they moved to Node.js for the server side of their mobile app and for Groupon they moved their entire web and mobile traffic stack for faster times. Why? Because Node was the better choice, it was the right tool for the job, thinner, lighter, faster.

That’s how technologies get replaced, when they chose Ruby or Java, that was the right tool for the job, but things change, businesses grow, the environment gets new requirements and new languages enter the arena. This happens constantly, it’s happening right now as we speak, someone out there is thinking of a new language that does things better in certain cases. Node.js has been growing like crazy, getting into a lot of startups and large enterprise size companies. If you check out any job board you will find plenty of Node.js job position, mostly related to JavaScript, for a full stack approach or related to other technologies as well.

Every technology is replaceable, even node.js, but if it evolve in such a way that it remains the best solution for problems to come, not just for current predicaments, then it will become and remain dominant in the industry.

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Last month, NodeSource released a new product called Certified Modules that helps secure the massive ecosystem of Node packages available now. Npm is actually the world’s  largest software registry with more than 2.070.812.887 weekly package downloads and 6.5 million developers using it on a monthly basis.

The product responds to a need to secure the ever growing mass of modules that millions of developers rely on constantly. The NodeSource Certified Modules offer a way to certify modules and make sure they are safe to use. A break in a module used by thousands of developers and organization could prove disastrous. This product would ensure that users use modules that are reliable and secure.  Third party modules present risks, they’re always a gamble, but with Certified Modules you have a certification process that evaluates each package and calculates a quantitative trust score.

The monitoring process will be ongoing, but paid. This way whenever you want to choose a certain Node.js module you can also take into account the safety factor.

This is the first time that something like this has been endeavored for Node.js modules and as such it represents uncharted territory. The concept and product certainly makes sense and offers a needed layer of security, but it also implies trusting one single vendor to guard the safety of hundred of thousand of modules, used by a very large and ever growing community.

NodeSource uses the following criteria for certifying modules:

• Security: All published modules are checked for known security vulnerabilities

• Licensing: Every module is checked to ensure it is fully licensed as open-source

• Integrity: Quality marks like quantitative documentation, testing tooling, and install size

You can read more about the  Certified Modules on their press release.

If you want to try out Node Source Certification Modules you can (for free).You get a secure registry, almost identical to the npm one, the difference being that every package and every version of every package goes through the NodeSource Certification process and is assigned a score.

What do you think of this NodeSource product? Will you try it out?

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Bustle is an online American women’s magazine founded in 2013 by Bryan Goldberg. They have a huge team of writers and contributors and cover various topics related to women. They cover beauty, fashion, entertainment, books and more. It’s also a very high traffic website that uses Node.js.

This is another story of a company moving from one technology to Node. It’s not quite surprising that that technology was Ruby on Rails, it seems like a lot of companies moved from Ruby and Java to Node, including Groupon, Uber, Pay Pal etc. It’s not that they’re bad languages, they’re just not appropriate for certain business at a given stage in their life.

Bustle uses Node as a full stack runtime, they don’t define their team on frontend and backend, which is a very attractive advantages of moving your tech stack to node, because  keeping one universal language (JavaScript) makes everything easier.

They’re advocates and users of serverless arhitectura, running code on AWB Lambda, which provides them with the tools they need, without relying on a lot of frameworks or libraries. They use Ember on the front end and a bit of React.

AWS Lambda was a big deal for them and back in the day it was only compatible with Node and Java and the latter wasn’t very thrilling to use so they gradually tried out Node and loved it. Working with Node and Ember at the same time was also a pretty exciting opportunity. Bustle has 50 million users a month and all their properties are serverless and Node is proving them with the performance needed to maintain this kind of traffic.

We’ll call this another Node.js success story, but more importantly it’s another rather big and important brand that has transitioned successfully to Node and is enjoying quite a bit of success because of it.

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Rolique is a fast-growing web and mobile development company, based in Poland with expertise in design and development of custom websites and applications (Node.js, AngularJS, Drupal, Laravel, iOS, Android). As a company and a team they are dedicated to building flawless software for their clients. One of the technologies they cover is node.js, they use it extensively while developing server-side of web projects and completed several projects, implementing multiple features.

Here are 3 projects they worked on in Node.js:

1. RosterCoach project – website for fantasy football video courses

Node.js was used for website server-side development. They dealt with implementation of API, such as Mailchimp, Mandrill, Stripe, Wistia. 

We’re going to detail this project a bit more extensively.  The basics are: the Rolique team provided a fast platform, creating a single-page application on AngularJS in combination with NodeJS and MongoDB.

Their team created a responsive web design, focusing on the target audience and users. After doing quite a bit of industry research, they’ve come up with a modern and professional brand style. On the technical side, Rolique engineers were faced with multiple challenges and implemented various features. The most important challenge was related to the integration of 3rd party API: Wistia, Stripe, Mailchimp.

With Wistia, the  client was able to upload an immense number of videos. The Rolique engineers took care of preventing errors while uploading videos and added video speed options for users. Through the MailChimp integration, each user role had a separate group. Also, it was a very important task to enable MailChimp groups to be fast and easily updated when a user upgraded or downgraded a role.

The platform is also equipped with a convenient payment system – Stripe, which is easy to use both for businesses and customers.

Overall, the RosterCoach platform is very convenient in management of administrative activities. Rolique provided a set of dashboards for video uploading, courses creation, subscribers management and content management. Users are able to set tags for videos. All the course videos are thoroughly parsed and provided with unique tags which are not duplicated.

One more task the team dealt with was the creation of CRON on NodeJS for subscribers autocharge. With CRON, they enabled the platform to parse all subscribers every day and check their expired date. This helped the client keep all users payments updated and avoid charging errors.

2. Church community platform

Node.js was used for the work with google-geo API, cloudinary and MongoDB (Location index)

3. Marketing platform

This is a current project that they are working on. It’s an all-new marketing platform with Node.js on the server-side and build API (Facebook, instagram, twitter).

These were 3 Node.js projects by Rolique. It was great to know more about how such a company uses Node.js and how they apply the technology to various types of projects. To learn more about them, check out their profile on BuiltinNode or have a look at their website!

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CronJ is one of the Node.js companies that joined our BuiltinNode family recently. They are a software development company focusing on JavaScript, in various forms – Node.js, Angular.js and React. They focus mostly on Node.js having more than 40k hours of experience in this technology. They are a great example on how a company can be built on node.js technological capabilities. It was started from a passion of node, by their two founding members, Akash and Monu. They saw in node.js a great opportunity so they took a chance on a company built on it. A company built by developers who actually worked on node.js and had a good grip on the entire stack., also contributing in several open source projects.

It’s also worth noting that this is a success story, one of many, from Bangalore, the Silicon Valley of India. As we mentioned in one of our earlier articles, the regional interest in node.js is quite interesting, as involvement in node.js is very high in Asia, especially in India and South Korea. CronJ is one of the companies that pushed forward in node development, working with clients from all over the world. Check out their portfolio here.

     

CronJ has worked with more than 18 countries, proving the demand in node.js and its rise in the programming world. They became a strong JavaScript development company in 4 short years, by betting strong on Node extensively in their projects. CronJ is truly a full JavaScript house, one that currently encompasses 30 team members that work on real-time applications, e-commerce platforms, gaming networks, social networking platforms etc. They use Node.js as their main technology but they’re experts in complete MEAN stack development. CronJ has been working with startups, mid-sized companies to enterprise large scale companies like USA Today, Mitsubishi, Apollo Hospitals, Cairn India, 9X Media and many more.

They rely on node.js and support it equally, right now they also want to hire close to 50 developers this year, so keep tuned for job posts on the job board and don’t forget to check out their profile.

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We’ve written a few articles on big corporations and big brands switching to Node.js for their own business, names like Netflix, Uber, GoDaddy. This is great news for Node, but has caused a shortage in qualified and experienced developers and in turn driven up costs. As a result income generating new projects go on the backburner, are delivered late or if a startup may never leave the runway.

IT services companies, the ones that work with all sorts of clients and businesses, don’t have the luxury of keeping to just one or two technologies, they are ready to fill the gaps. Evozon has invested heavily in node skills staying ahead of the wave rather than just watching it from its early inception. Now Evozon has node developers with years of experience ready to get at it. But let’s rewind a bit and tell you more about Evozon.

Evozon is an Australian and Romanian owned company based in Cluj Napoca, Transylvania with satellite offices in London, Malmo and Nagoya. It’s co-founders passion and interest in Java and Perl started small and over ten years grew to a set of the most demanded technologies in the world with over 500 developers. Evozon’s talent and expertise covers Java, Perl, .Net, PHP, Node, Mobile, C++ and modern JavaScript with support from their own consultants, analysts, trainers and testers.

Evozon has various areas of expertise starting with custom software development, e-commerce, CMS, mobile and IT services. It’s a company that covers a broad spectrum of technologies and one that uses and works in Node for themselves and their clients. Check them out!

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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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