Node.js currently has the smallest standard library of any comparable platform. Combined with great ecosystem tooling like npm this approach has been a huge success.

This success has created a culture in Node.js that is militant about small re-usable modules, a large ecosystem, and a small core. There’s even a fairly vocal push to make the existing Node.js Core surface area smaller.

Spotlight #6: "Small Core" - Keeping Node Core Small with Sam Roberts and Thomas Watson

Lost in the enthusiasm for our ecosystem is the role of what Node.js did include in its standard library played on enabling that ecosystem.

As new technologies emerge there continues to be a need for Node.js Core to set compatibility standards in order for our ecosystem to thrive.

Not having require(‘http’) would have been a disaster.

When Node.js started all comparable platforms had standards to connect an HTTP “server” to a “framework.”

CGI (Perl), WSGI (Python), and Rack (Ruby) are all essentially the same thing, a way to remove the HTTP parsing from the API most developers will actually write their applications to: their web framework. This is particularly important for platforms with poor concurrency because they rely on external web servers (Apache, Nginx, etc) to manage incoming connections and related parsing.

When Node.js started in 2009 CommonJS had already defined similar standard for JavaScript called JSGI. Support for this standard already existed in other JS platforms like Narwhal and there was pressure to implement it in Node.js as well.

Early Node.js contributor and future npm author isaacs put together a version of JSGI called EJSGI (Evented-JSGI) that was compatible with Node.js’ async concurrency model; but this wasn’t the route Node.js ended up taking.

Instead, Node.js went much farther than other platforms. Node.js essentially prescribed the “framework” layer of API and bundled it with the entire server implementation. While on the surface Node.js had a smaller total standard library that its contemporaries, it actually went much farther in what it did define.

Frameworks can be ecosystem poison.

Back in 2009, you could look at Ruby and Python and the multitude of web frameworks available for each and see what the problem was. A diversity of modules is only good for an ecosystem if they are actually compatible with one another. Since frameworks create their own vertical plugin systems they end up with component ecosystems that are incompatible with one another.

Node.js’ decision to define this layer inverted that trend, forcing a high level of compatibility between modules built for HTTP. When frameworks eventually did emerge they extended the standard API rather than creating entirely incompatible APIs of their own. This meant that most of the modules built for theses frameworks were compatible with one another and that modules written for the “standard” HTTP API worked with every framework.

A lot of attention is paid to the size of the Node.js ecosystem because it’s the largest in the world. Lost in our admiration over its size is the fact that those modules have the highest level of compatibility with one another compared to other platforms. That compatibility is all the result of standardized patterns defined by Node.js Core like Streams, Modules, error first callbacks, and to lesser recognized APIs like require(‘http’).

Standards belong in Core.

Maintaining the reference implementations of standards is a burden, there’s no doubt about that. Node.js Core’s stream library will always lag behind the one in npm. But that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t belong in Core.

In order for standards to actually reach a critical mass of adoption in the ecosystem, in order for them to truly be relied upon, they have to be included in Core. There are great standards outside of Core in the Node.js ecosystem but none with enough adoption that they can be taken for granted.

Abstract Blob Store is a fantastic standard, one that I try to use whenever possible. While many influential Node.js developers conform to this standard it is nowhere near the point of adoption that it can always be relied upon. Several cloud services still don’t have an implementation and it’s nowhere near the point where service providers conform to it by default, in contrast to the standards defined by Node.js Core.

The reason we try to keep things out of Core is to encourage innovation in the ecosystem. Standardization is a process of discouraging a particular type of innovation that limits compatibility. Standardization requires that we de-value and discourage un-compliant innovation. Including these standards in Core discourages competitive standards in the ecosystem and that’s exactly what we want.

In the future we’ll want to add standard APIs for technologies like HTTP/2 because we’ll want to replicate the highly compatible ecosystem for HTTP/2 that we have for HTTP/1.1.

Make Node.js Core Bigger was originally published in Node & JavaScript on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I’ve been doing Open Source for over a decade and I’ve never started a project quite like this.

On the surface, Roll Call is quite simple. Free calls for everyone in the world.

With modern web technologies we should be able to make free audio calls to everyone in the world.

Since this technology is peer-to-peer, there should be little to no infrastructure cost.

That’s how it should be.

In reality, there isn’t a reliable project that accomplishes this. This problem also gets more complicated as we add some important additional requirements.

• People in countries that sanction censorship and block services should be able to access it reliably.
• Third parties (like Governments) should not be able to track users or listen to calls.
• Users should be able to record calls to produce new media like podcasts.

Admittedly, Roll Call doesn’t accomplish all of this today, but what it does do today:

• Reliable audio-only calls between multiple participants.
• Audio files can be dragged into the call window and played into the call. (This is super fun, you can see it work in the gif above, why have I never seen this before?)
• Call recording is built-in, with podcast quality recording of every participants local audio sent continuously to the recorder.
• Relies on almost no infrastructure, the application is quite literally hosted in gh-pages on GitHub.

Most of the open source work I’ve done has been on platforms and libraries for developers. In order for Roll Call to be successful it needs to be a product.

Open Source products are quite rare, especially in modern open source. Many of the lessons I’ve learned about how to manage and scale open source may not apply, but I’m excited to see how this all turns out. Needless to say, I’ll be experimenting along the way with different approaches to governance and contribution policies that are participatory but also product centric.

If the goals of this project are interesting, come join me 🙋

I’m terrible at many, many, skills necessary to make this project succeed. If you want a solid example, look at the current UI. I basically just pulled semantic-ui examples off the shelf 😜

If you have any questions, comments, suggestions, everything is on GitHub, just log an issue.

A New Kind of Open Source was originally published in Node & JavaScript on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Node.js v4.1.1 Releases

This week we have one release: Node.js v4.1.1, complete changelog from previous releases can be found on GitHub.

Node.js v4.1.1 Notable changes

• buffer: Fixed a bug introduced in v4.1.0 where allocating a new zero-length buffer can result in the next allocation of a TypedArray in JavaScript not being zero-filled. In certain circumstances this could result in data leakage via reuse of memory space in TypedArrays, breaking the normally safe assumption that TypedArrays should be always zero-filled. (Trevor Norris) #2931.
• http: Guard against response-splitting of HTTP trailing headers added via response.addTrailers() by removing new-line ([\r\n]) characters from values. Note that standard header values are already stripped of new-line characters. The expected security impact is low because trailing headers are rarely used. (Ben Noordhuis) #2945.
• npm: Upgrade to npm 2.14.4 from 2.14.3, see release notes for full details (Kat Marchán) #2958
• Upgrades graceful-fs on multiple dependencies to no longer rely on monkey-patching fs
• Fix npm link for pre-release / RC builds of Node
• v8: Update post-mortem metadata to allow post-mortem debugging tools to find and inspect:
• JavaScript objects that use dictionary properties (Julien Gilli) #2959
• ScopeInfo and thus closures (Julien Gilli) #2974

Known issues

See https://github.com/nodejs/node/labels/confirmed-bug for complete and current list of known issues.

• Some problems with unreferenced timers running during beforeExit are still to be resolved. See #1264.
• Surrogate pair in REPL can freeze terminal. #690
• Calling dns.setServers() while a DNS query is in progress can cause the process to crash on a failed assertion.#894
• url.resolve may transfer the auth portion of the url when resolving between two full hosts, see #1435.

Community Updates

• NodeSource announced N|Solid, “a platform built on Node.js and designed specifically for the unique needs of the enterprise” with a focus on insight, control and protection.
• NodeUp nintyone An Onboarding Show.

If you have spotted or written something about Node.js, do come over to our Evangelism team repo and suggest it on the Issues page, specifically the Weekly Updates issue.

Upcoming Events

• Node.js Italian Conference tickets are on sale, October 10th at Desenzano — Brescia, Italy
• JSConf CO, October 16th — 17th at Ruta N, Medellin, Colombia
• EmpireNode, October 23rd at New York, US.
• NodeFest, November 7th at Tokyo, Japan
• Nodevember, November 14th — 15th at Nashville, Tennessee, US.
• NodeConf Barcelona, November 21st at Barcelona, Spain
• Node.js Interactive, December 8–9 at Portland, US.

Have an event about Node.js coming up? You can put your events here through the Evangelism team repo and announce it in the Issues page, specifically the Weekly Updates issue.

Node.js News — September 18th was originally published in Node & JavaScript on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Node.js v4.1.0 and io.js v3.3.1 Releases

This week we have two releases: Node.js v4.1.0 and io.js v3.3.1, complete changelog from previous releases can be found on GitHub.

Node.js v4.1.0 Notable changes

• buffer:
• Buffers are now created in JavaScript, rather than C++. This increases the speed of buffer creation (Trevor Norris) #2866.Buffer#slice() now uses Uint8Array#subarray() internally, increasing slice() performance (Karl Skomski)#2777.
• fs:
• fs.utimes() now properly converts numeric strings, NaN, and Infinity (Yazhong Liu) #2387.
• fs.WriteStream now implements _writev, allowing for super-fast bulk writes (Ron Korving) #2167.
• http: Fixed an issue with certain write() sizes causing errors when using http.request() (Fedor Indutny) #2824.
• npm: Upgrade to version 2.14.3, see https://github.com/npm/npm/releases/tag/v2.14.3 for more details (Kat Marchán) #2822.
• src: V8 cpu profiling no longer erroneously shows idle time (Oleksandr Chekhovskyi) #2324.
• timers: #ref() and #unref() now return the timer they belong to (Sam Roberts) #2905.
• v8: Lateral upgrade to 4.5.103.33 from 4.5.103.30, contains minor fixes (Ali Ijaz Sheikh) #2870.
• This fixes a previously known bug where some computed object shorthand properties did not work correctly (#2507).

io.js v3.3.1 Notable changes

• buffer: Fixed a minor errors that was causing crashes (Michaël Zasso) #2635,
• child_process: Fix error that was causing crashes (Evan Lucas) #2727
• crypto: Replace use of rwlocks, unsafe on Windows XP / 2003 (Ben Noordhuis) #2723
• libuv: Upgrade from 1.7.3 to 1.7.4 (Saúl Ibarra Corretgé) #2817
• node: Fix faulty process.release.libUrl on Windows (Rod Vagg) #2699
• node-gyp: Float v3.0.3 which has improved support for Node.js and io.js v0.10 to v4+ (Rod Vagg) #2700
• npm: Upgrade to version 2.14.3 from 2.13.3, includes a security update, seehttps://github.com/npm/npm/releases/tag/v2.14.2 for more details, (Kat Marchán) #2696.
• timers: Improved timer performance from porting the 0.12 implementation, plus minor fixes (Jeremiah Senkpiel)#2540, (Julien Gilli) nodejs/node-v0.x-archive#8751 nodejs/node-v0.x-archive#8905

Known issues

See https://github.com/nodejs/node/labels/confirmed-bug for complete and current list of known issues.

• Some uses of computed object shorthand properties are not handled correctly by the current version of V8. e.g. [{ [prop]: val }] evaluates to [{}]. #2507
• Some problems with unreferenced timers running during beforeExit are still to be resolved. See #1264.
• Surrogate pair in REPL can freeze terminal. #690
• Calling dns.setServers() while a DNS query is in progress can cause the process to crash on a failed assertion.#894
• url.resolve may transfer the auth portion of the url when resolving between two full hosts, see #1435.

Node.js Foundation Combines Node.js and io.js Into Single Codebase in New Release

Node.js Foundation posts an entry about Node.js new release and introduction of Node Foundation. The details are here

Node.js Interactive

Node.js Interactive is a new, annual, vendor-neutral conference for Node.js. It is being led by the newly formed Node.js Foundation.

Community Updates

• We still need a V8 maintainer for our LTS build! Head on over to GitHub to see if the requirements match your capabilities.
• According to Raygun blog, Node.js v4.0.0 is 8% faster than Node.js v0.12.
• Tony Pujals, evangelism WG member, posts an entry about Node.js v4.0.0, He discusses ES6 in Node.js v4.0.0, LTS, and SemVer.

If you have spotted or written something about Node.js, do come over to our Evangelism team repo and suggest it on the Issues page, specifically the Weekly Updates issue.

Upcoming Events

• Node.js Italian Conference tickets are on sale, October 10th at Desenzano — Brescia, Italy
• JSConf CO, October 16th — 17th at Ruta N, Medellin, Colombia
• EmpireNode, October 23rd at New York, US.
• NodeFest, November 7th at Tokyo, Japan
• Nodevember, November 14th — 15th at Nashville, Tennessee, US.
• NodeConf Barcelona, November 21st at Barcelona, Spain
• Node.js Interactive, December 8–9 at Portland, US.

Have an event about Node.js coming up? You can put your events here through the Evangelism team repo and announce it in the Issues page, specifically the Weekly Updates issue.

Node.js News — September 11th was originally published in Node & JavaScript on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Node.js v4.0.0

This week is the most historical week. Finally we have released Node.js v4.0.0(stable). Thanks to the every Node/io.js collaborator. This Node.js is the most stable Node ever. We have reviewed all of patches and the state of the test suite is more stable and there are more active contributors in new Node.

We would like to talk about this news, changes, features. But currently we don’t have so much spaces and times. We hope that Node community will post more blog entries or more news.

Node.js v4.0.0 Notable changes

This list of changes is relative to the last io.js v3.x branch release, v3.3.0. Please see the list of notable changes in the v3.x, v2.x and v1.x releases for a more complete list of changes from 0.12.x. Note, that some changes in the v3.x series as well as major breaking changes in this release constitute changes required for full convergence of the Node.js and io.js projects.

• child_process: ChildProcess.prototype.send() and process.send() operate asynchronously across all platforms so an optional callback parameter has been introduced that will be invoked once the message has been sent, i.e. .send(message[, sendHandle][, callback]) (Ben Noordhuis) #2620.
• node: Rename “io.js” code to “Node.js” (cjihrig) #2367.
• node-gyp: This release bundles an updated version of node-gyp that works with all versions of Node.js and io.js including nightly and release candidate builds. From io.js v3 and Node.js v4 onward, it will only download a headers tarball when building addons rather than the entire source. (Rod Vagg) #2700
• npm: Upgrade to version 2.14.2 from 2.13.3, includes a security update, seehttps://github.com/npm/npm/releases/tag/v2.14.2 for more details, (Kat Marchán) #2696.
• timers: Improved timer performance from porting the 0.12 implementation, plus minor fixes (Jeremiah Senkpiel)#2540, (Julien Gilli) nodejs/node-v0.x-archive#8751 nodejs/node-v0.x-archive#8905
• util: The util.is*() functions have been deprecated, beginning with deprecation warnings in the documentation for this release, users are encouraged to seek more robust alternatives in the npm registry, (Sakthipriyan Vairamani)#2447.
• v8: Upgrade to version 4.5.103.30 from 4.4.63.30 (Ali Ijaz Sheikh) #2632.
• Implement new TypedArray prototype methods: copyWithin(), every(), fill(), filter(), find(),findIndex(), forEach(), indexOf(), join(), lastIndexOf(), map(), reduce(), reduceRight(),reverse(), slice(), some(), sort(). See https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Global_Objects/TypedArray for further information.Implement new TypedArray.from() and TypedArray.of() functions. See https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Global_Objects/TypedArray for further information.Implement arrow functions, see https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Functions/Arrow_functions for further information.Full ChangeLog available at https://github.com/v8/v8-git-mirror/blob/4.5.103/ChangeLog

Known issues

See https://github.com/nodejs/node/labels/confirmed-bug for complete and current list of known issues.

• Some uses of computed object shorthand properties are not handled correctly by the current version of V8. e.g. [{ [prop]: val }] evaluates to [{}]. #2507
• Some problems with unreferenced timers running during beforeExit are still to be resolved. See #1264.
• Surrogate pair in REPL can freeze terminal. #690
• Calling dns.setServers() while a DNS query is in progress can cause the process to crash on a failed assertion.#894
• url.resolve may transfer the auth portion of the url when resolving between two full hosts, see #1435.

Node.js v4.0.0(stable) entry is posted

• We have posted Node v4.0.0 entry. This entry has more details about Node.js v4.0.0.

We are creating the list of modules that currently do not work with Node.js v4.0.0

• We are listing modules that do not work with Node.js v4.0.0, If you have some troubles in your modules with Node.js v4.0.0, please provide information in this issue.

Community Updates

• We still need a V8 maintainer for our LTS build! Head on over to GitHub to see if the requirements match your capabilities.
• Jeremiah Senkpiel, Node TSC member, has introduced Node.js v4.0.0 deeply. Please check this blog
• Daniel Khan posted the entry about Node.js v4.0 performance, features and LTS. His entry will help your migration.

If you have spotted or written something about Node.js and io.js, do come over to our Evangelism team repo and suggest it on the Issues page, specifically the Weekly Updates issue.

Upcoming Events

• Node.js Italian Conference tickets are on sale, October 10th at Desenzano — Brescia, Italy
• EmpireNode, October 23rd at New York, US.
• JSConf CO, October 16th — 17th at Ruta N, Medellin, Columbia
• NodeFest, November 7th at Tokyo, Japan
• Nodevember, November 14th — 15th at Nashville, Tennessee, US.
• NodeConf Barcelona, November 21st at Barcelona, Spain

Have an event about Node.js and io.js coming up? You can put your events here through the Evangelism team repo and announce it in the Issues page, specifically the Weekly Updates issue.

Node.js News — September 4th was originally published in Node & JavaScript on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

io.js 3.2 and 3.3 Releases

This week we have two io.js releases: v3.2.0 and v3.3.0, complete changelog from previous releases can be found on GitHub.

io.js v3.3.0 Notable changes

• build: Add a — link-module option to configure that can be used to bundle additional JavaScript modules into a built binary (Bradley Meck) #2497
• docs: Merge outstanding doc updates from joyent/node (James M Snell) #2378
• http_parser: Significant performance improvement by having http.Server consume all initial data from itsnet.Socket and parsing directly without having to enter JavaScript. Any ‘data’ listeners on the net.Socket will result in the data being “unconsumed” into JavaScript, thereby undoing any performance gains. (Fedor Indutny)#2355
• libuv: Upgrade to 1.7.3 (from 1.6.1), see ChangeLog for details (Saúl Ibarra Corretgé) #2310
• V8: Upgrade to 4.4.63.30 (from 4.4.63.26) (Michaël Zasso) #2482

io.js v3.2.0 Notable changes

• events: Added EventEmitter#listenerCount(event) as a replacement for EventEmitter.listenerCount(emitter, event), which has now been marked as deprecated in the docs. (Sakthipriyan Vairamani) #2349
• module: Fixed an error with preloaded modules when the current working directory doesn’t exist. (Bradley Meck)#2353
• node: Startup time is now about 5% faster when not passing V8 flags. (Evan Lucas) #2483
• repl: Tab-completion now works better with arrays. (James M Snell) #2409
• string_bytes: Fixed an unaligned write in the handling of UCS2 encoding. (Fedor Indutny) #2480
• tls: Added a new — tls-cipher-list flag that can be used to override the built-in default cipher list. (James M Snell) #2412 Note: it is suggested you use the built-in cipher list as it has been carefully selected to reflect current security best practices and risk mitigation.

Known issues

See https://github.com/nodejs/io.js/labels/confirmed-bug for complete and current list of known issues.

• Some uses of computed object shorthand properties are not handled correctly by the current version of V8. e.g. [{ [prop]: val }] evaluates to [{}]. #2507
• Some problems with unreferenced timers running during beforeExit are still to be resolved. See #1264.
• Surrogate pair in REPL can freeze terminal. #690
• process.send() is not synchronous as the docs suggest, a regression introduced in 1.0.2, see #760.
• Calling dns.setServers() while a DNS query is in progress can cause the process to crash on a failed assertion.#894
• url.resolve may transfer the auth portion of the url when resolving between two full hosts, see #1435.

We need Node.js v4 evangelists

• Node.js v4 is released soon. We need evangelists for Node.js v4. If you have an interest to evangelize, provide your information in this issue.
• Current members:
• Fedor Indutny (@indutny)
• Yosuke Furukawa (@yosuke-furukawa)
• Sakthipriyan Vairamani (@thefourtheye)
• Jackson Tian (@JacksonTian)
• P.S.V.R (@pmq20)
• James M Snell (@pmq20)
• Mikeal Rogers (@mikeal)
• Colin Ihrig (@cjihrig)
• Jeremiah Senkpiel (@Fishrock123)
• Rich Trott (@Trott)
• Julian Duque (@julianduque)
• Stephen Belanger (@Qard)
• Ben Noordhuis (@bnoordhuis)
• Trevor Norris (@trevnorris)
• Rod Vagg (@rvagg)
• Evan Lucas (@evanlucas)
• Daniel Khan (@danielkhan)
• Raja Sekar (@rajzshkr)

New nodejs.org went live today

• New nodejs.org went live today, served from DigitalOcean and CloudFlare, contributors should go tohttps://github.com/nodejs/new.nodejs.org.

Community Updates

• We still need a V8 maintainer for our LTS build! Head on over to GitHub to see if the requirements match your capabilities.
• npm posts an blog entry about tips for testing and deploy.

If you have spotted or written something about Node.js and io.js, do come over to our Evangelism team repo and suggest it on the Issues page, specifically the Weekly Updates issue.

Upcoming Events

• NodeConf EU tickets are on sale, September 6th — 9th at Waterford, Ireland
• nodeday tickets are on sale, September 10th at Karnataka, India
• Node.js Italian Conference tickets are on sale, October 10th at Desenzano — Brescia, Italy
• EmpireNode, October 23rd at New York, US.
• JSConf CO, October 16th — 17th at Ruta N, Medellin, Columbia
• NodeFest, November 7th at Tokyo, Japan
• Nodevember, November 14th — 15th at Nashville, Tennessee, US.

Have an event about Node.js and io.js coming up? You can put your events here through the Evangelism team repo and announce it in the Issues page, specifically the Weekly Updates issue.

io.js and Node.js Week of August 28th was originally published in Node & JavaScript on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

io.js v3.1.0 Release

Notable changes

• buffer: Fixed a couple large memory leaks (Ben Noordhuis) #2352.
• crypto:
• Fixed a couple of minor memory leaks (Karl Skomski) #2375.Signing now checks for OpenSSL errors (P.S.V.R) #2342. Note that this may expose previously hidden errors in user code.
• intl: Intl support using small-icu is now enabled by default in builds (Steven R. Loomis) #2264.
• String#normalize() can now be used for unicode normalization.The Intl object and various String and Number methods are present, but only support the English locale.For support of all locales, node must be built with full-icu.
• tls: Fixed tls throughput being much lower after an incorrect merge (Fedor Indutny) #2381.
• tools: The v8 tick processor now comes bundled with node (Matt Loring) #2090.
• This can be used by producing performance profiling output by running node with — perf, then running your appropriate platform’s script on the output as found in tools/v8-prof.
• util: util.inspect(obj) now prints the constructor name of the object if there is one (Christopher Monsanto)#1935.

Known issues

See https://github.com/nodejs/io.js/labels/confirmed-bug for complete and current list of known issues.

• Some problems with unreferenced timers running during beforeExit are still to be resolved. See #1264.
• Surrogate pair in REPL can freeze terminal. #690
• process.send() is not synchronous as the docs suggest, a regression introduced in 1.0.2, see #760.
• Calling dns.setServers() while a DNS query is in progress can cause the process to crash on a failed assertion.#894
• url.resolve may transfer the auth portion of the url when resolving between two full hosts, see #1435.

Node.js v0.12 LTS plan has been shortened

• Node.js v0.12 LTS plan has been shortened to end at the end of 2016, because OpenSSL 1.0.1 LTS is scheduled until the end of 2016. The detail is here.

Community Updates

• We still need a V8 maintainer for our LTS build! Head on over to GitHub to see if the requirements match your capabilities.
• Marko Bonaći published his blog post about his first useful Node.js product which can search log files.
• Rod Vagg updated his post about the state of the Node.js build on ARM. In the entry, Rod details how Node core members test and build Node.js for ARM hardware.

If you have spotted or written something about Node.js and io.js, do come over to our Evangelism team repo and suggest it on the Issues page, specifically the Weekly Updates issue.

Upcoming Events

• BrazilJS Conf tickets are on sale, August 21st — 22nd at Shopping Center BarraShoppingSul
• nodeday tickets are on sale, September 10th at Karnataka, India
• NodeConf EU tickets are on sale, September 6th — 9th at Waterford, Ireland
• Node.js Italian Conference tickets are on sale, October 10th at Desenzano — Brescia, Italy
• JSConf CO, October 16th — 17th at Ruta N, Medellin
• Nodevember, November 14th — 15th at Nashville, Tennessee, US.

Have an event about Node.js and io.js coming up? You can put your events here through the Evangelism team repo and announce it in the Issues page, specifically the Weekly Updates issue.

io.js and Node.js Week of August 21st was originally published in Node & JavaScript on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

nodejs/io.js has moved to nodejs/node!

Rod Vagg made a proposal regarding the convergence work between io.js and Node.js earlier this week, and one of them is about renaming the nodejs/io.js repository to nodejs/node. A decision has been made, and nodejs/node is our new home!

With the new repository name, io.js v3.x will be our last major version of io.js as the next (v4.x) will be Node.js v4.x.

Other points in the proposal are:

• The new repository to be the host of all future releases including io.js v3 and Node.js 0.10 and 0.12. The suggestion is that they will be in separate branches named v0.10.x and v0.12.x alongside with the existing v3.x branch.
• Leaving joyent/node in place for now, encouraging all new issues and pull requests in it to be filed in nodejs/node instead. There is also a possibility to move joyent/node to nodejs/node-legacy or a similarly named repository.
• Documenting a new, simpler version of CONTRIBUTING.md for casual contributions, as contributions need to be documented according to the new branch structure nodejs/node will have. With the new branches hosting the different versions, contributors will need to be aware which branch they need to file a pull request to and which version are their issues related to.

Jump on the conversation on the nodejs/node issue page.

Community Updates

• We still need a V8 maintainer for our LTS build! Head on over to GitHub to see if the requirements match your capabilities.
• As mentioned up top, io.js v4.x will be Node.js v4.x. Or as Mikeal Rogers said, 4.0 is the new 1.0.
• The Node.js Collaborator Summit was hosted on 6th — 7th August in San Fransisco. You can see the notes in the nodejs/summit repository, the GitHub issue, or on the Google Docs folder.
• nodejs/collaboration was made along with the team to help with communication between Working Groups, as well as getting better ways to have evangelism, website, documentation and the 30+ i18n groups work together.
• The new Intl WG had a meeting on August 11th.
• David Walsh has written about using yargs to get Node.js command line arguments.
• Reindex has a post about building a GraphQL server with Node.js and SQL
• Amine Kabab made a QR code generator library for Node.js

If you have spotted or written something about Node.js and io.js, do come over to our Evangelism team repo and suggest it on the Issues page, specifically the Weekly Updates issue.

Upcoming Events

• BrazilJS Conf tickets are on sale, August 21st — 22nd at Shopping Center BarraShoppingSul
• NodeConf EU tickets are on sale, September 6th — 9th at Waterford, Ireland
• Node.js Italian Conference tickets are on sale, October 10th at Desenzano — Brescia, Italy
• JSConf CO, October 16th — 17th at Ruta N, Medellin
• Nodevember, November 14th — 15th at Nashville, Tennessee, US.

Have an event about Node.js and io.js coming up? You can put your events here through the Evangelism team repo and announce it in the Issues page, specifically the Weekly Updates issue.

io.js and Node.js News — August 14th was originally published in Node & JavaScript on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Last week was a typical San Francisco summer, sunny with occasionally hostile winds. This was the setting for 40 node.js contributors to gather for the first ever Collaborator Summit, organized by the new Node.js Foundation.

A year ago we didn’t have 40 contributors to gather but today this represents only a fraction of the total contributor base (359 GitHub org members as of 8/12). This is due in large part to Joyent’s migration of node.js to a foundation and the merger of io.js into that foundation. As a unified project node.js has seen more progress than ever and will soon see Node.js v4.0 — the first unified release of the io.js and node.js codebases.

Timeline

• February — Joyent announces formation of the Node.js Foundation at Node Summit.
• March — Foundation By-law drafts are circulated.
• May — io.js TC votes to enter the Node.js Foundation and merge with node.js.
• June — Official launch of the Node.js Foundation w/ founding members.
• July — Node.js Foundation Board of Directors established.
• August — First ever Node.js Collaborator Summit.
• September— Node.js v4.0 (first fully converged release).
• December — World Domination.

For the last few months governance and development of io.js and node.js have happened jointly. While everyone involved would like to see a converged release happen as quickly as possible the TSC has also been dedicated to continuing regular releases of io.js and node.js 0.12.x which are in use by the developer community.

Along the way we discovered a few problems with the development and release process we were operating under and have also struggled with a recent sizable change to V8.

Native Modules

The module ecosystem is one of the best parts of being a Node developer. A tiny portion of these modules are what we call “native modules” meaning that they rely, in some way, on V8's C++ API and are not purely JavaScript. This has meant that every major release of node.js broke these native modules and they would each have to be updated to work with a newer v8.

In mid-2013 Rod Vagg released NAN (Native Abstractions for Node), a module which can be used by native module developers to simultaneously support multiple versions of V8 found in node.js (0.8, 0.10, 0.12, etc). This meant that developers didn’t have to write lots of code to handle varying versions of V8 but it didn’t stop native modules from being broken by new versions of V8.

For most of the history of NAN native module developers have been able simply upgrade their version of NAN to one that includes support for the latest version of node.js. Unfortunately, the deep dependency chains found in node.js modules means that it still takes quite a bit of time for the dependencies of a native module to be updated (and the deps of deps, and deps of deps of deps, and so on).

How many modules are we talking about? Less than 600 modules currently depend directly on NAN (less than half a percent of the total modules in NPM) but if you factor in all the deep dependencies on those modules up to 30% of the modules in npm depend indirectly on NAN. Being that it takes a while for these modules to all catch up to new versions the TSC developed a new release process which leaves a longer period of time for modules to upgrade before major releases go out that affect the native module ecosystem.

What does “io.js v3 is node.js v4 alpha” mean?

When io.js was first released it upgraded to a newer version of V8 (node.js was a few years out of date) and a new version of NAN was released to support it. Recent changes to V8 which are included in io.js v3 are much more profound and require not only a newer version of NAN but a breaking API change in NAN itself which requires code changes in all dependent native modules.

Knowing that this is a big change and that native module authors need time to catch up io.js v3 has been released, and will continue to be released in the coming weeks, for module authors to test and upgrade against. Node.js v4 will contain an even newer V8, but one that is already supported by the current version of NAN. This means that everyone who upgrades NAN to work on io.js v3 will also work with node.js v4 which is why we are calling io.js v3 an “alpha series” for node.js v4.

Node.js v4 will contain all the improvements made in io.js as well as features from node.js 0.12 that have not yet been present in an io.js release.

Having a converged project means converged release numbers which is why Node.js is jumping to v4.0 and avoiding overlap with any existing io.js version numbers.

Now, go ahead and download io.js v3 and start preparing for our next big release :)

4.0 is the new 1.0 was originally published in Node & JavaScript on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

io.js v3.0 Release

This week, io.js v3.0.0 is released! Since this is a major version bump, new features have been introduced to io.js. These are:

• V8 upgrade from v4.2 to v4.4. Rod Vagg (@rvagg) has a Gist containing the changelogs of v4.3 and v4.4.
• Computed property names ({[‘foo’+’bar’]:’bam’}) is now shipped without the need for any harmony- flag.
• Unicode escape sequence (\u{xxxxx}) is also shipped. There is no need for the — harmony option anymore.
• Previously classes are available but built-in Array subclasses are not supported or problematic. The new version of V8 has solved this problem.
• The spread operator (…) is supported with the — es-staging flag. This allows you to use it in places where multiple arguments (for function calls) or multiple elements (for array literals) are expected.
• The Rest parameters (function(…args) {}) are implemented behind the — es-staging flag as well.
• REPL now gets a history file. Previously REPL needs to specify NODE_REPL_HISTORY_FILE but the current version will have the history saved by default.
• Buffer is now a subclass of Uint8Array.
• The smalloc module has been removed, and the freelist module has now been deprecated.

With a major version bump, there are also breaking changes. These include:

• Changes on Buffer.concat, dgram send() error and http server timing behaviors.
• The upgrade on V8, which gives the need for recompiling of all native add-ons and the new Maybe<> andMaybeLocal<> types for add-on authors to transition to these new APIs as soon as possible.
• HTTP status codes. The code mappings conform to the IANA standard now and will be a backwards incompatible change to consumers that depend on the text value of a header.
• The HTTP agent .getName(), which fixes the unnecessary extra colon at the end of the return values.

You can find out more information about this release in the complete changelog, the Breaking Changes document and the pull request for the release proposal. In addition, Yosuke Furukawa has made a repo with details about the new features.

Notable changes

• buffer:
• Due to changes in V8, it has been necessary to reimplement Buffer on top of V8's Uint8Array. Every effort has been made to minimize the performance impact, however Buffer instantiation is measurably slower. Access operations may be faster in some circumstances but the exact performance profile and difference over previous versions will depend on how Buffer is used within applications. (Trevor Norris) #1825.Buffer can now take ArrayBuffers as a constructor argument (Trevor Norris) #2002.When a single buffer is passed to Buffer.concat(), a new, copied Buffer object will be returned; previous behavior was to return the original Buffer object (Sakthipriyan Vairamani) #1937.
• build: PPC support has been added to core to allow compiling on pLinux BE and LE (AIX support coming soon) (Michael Dawson) #2124.
• dgram: If an error occurs within socket.send() and a callback has been provided, the error is only passed as the first argument to the callback and not emitted on the socket object; previous behavior was to do both (Matteo Collina & Chris Dickinson) #1796
• freelist: Deprecate the undocumented freelist core module (Sakthipriyan Vairamani) #2176.
• http:
• Status codes now all use the official IANA names as per RFC7231, e.g. http.STATUS_CODES[414] now returns’URI Too Long’ rather than ‘Request-URI Too Large’ (jomo) #1470.Calling .getName() on an HTTP agent no longer returns a trailing colon, HTTPS agents will no longer return an extra colon near the middle of the string (Brendan Ashworth) #1617.
• node:
• NODE_MODULE_VERSION has been bumped to 45 to reflect the break in ABI (Rod Vagg) #2096.Introduce a new process.release object that contains a name property set to ‘io.js’ and sourceUrl,headersUrl and libUrl (Windows only) properties containing URLs for the relevant resources; this is intended to be used by node-gyp (Rod Vagg) #2154.The version of node-gyp bundled with io.js now downloads and uses a tarball of header files from iojs.org rather than the full source for compiling native add-ons; it is hoped this is a temporary floating patch and the change will be upstreamed to node-gyp soon (Rod Vagg) #2066.
• repl: Persistent history is now enabled by default. The history file is located at ~/.node_repl_history, which can be overridden by the new environment variable NODE_REPL_HISTORY. This deprecates the previousNODE_REPL_HISTORY_FILE variable. Additionally, the format of the file has been changed to plain text to better handle file corruption. (Jeremiah Senkpiel) #2224.
• smalloc: The smalloc module has been removed as it is no longer possible to provide the API due to changes in V8 (Ben Noordhuis) #2022.
• tls: Add server.getTicketKeys() and server.setTicketKeys() methods for TLS session key rotation (Fedor Indutny) #2227.
• v8: Upgraded to 4.4.63.26
• ES6: Enabled computed property namesES6: Array can now be subclassed in strict modeES6: Implement rest parameters in staging, use the — harmony-rest-parameters command line flagES6: Implement the spread operator in staging, use the — harmony-spreadcalls command line flagRemoved SetIndexedPropertiesToExternalArrayData and related APIs, forcing a shift to Buffer to be reimplemented based on Uint8ArrayIntroduction of Maybe and MaybeLocal C++ API for objects which may or may not have a value.Added support for PPC

See also https://github.com/nodejs/io.js/wiki/Breaking-Changes#300-from-2x for a summary of the breaking changes (SEMVER-MAJOR).

Known issues

See https://github.com/nodejs/io.js/labels/confirmed-bug for complete and current list of known issues.

• Some problems with unreferenced timers running during beforeExit are still to be resolved. See #1264.
• Surrogate pair in REPL can freeze terminal. #690
• process.send() is not synchronous as the docs suggest, a regression introduced in 1.0.2, see #760.
• Calling dns.setServers() while a DNS query is in progress can cause the process to crash on a failed assertion.#894
• url.resolve may transfer the auth portion of the url when resolving between two full hosts, see #1435.

Community Updates

• We still need a V8 maintainer for our LTS build! Head on over to GitHub to see if the requirements match your capabilities.
• webkid.io co-founder Moritz Klack has written about creating a REST API with Hapi, Dogwater and Bedwetter.
• RisingStack CEO Gergely Nemeth has a post in the company blog about using GraphQL with Graffiti.
• Samsung banks on JavaScript, Node.js for IoT, as reported by Paul Krill, editor at large at InfoWorld.

If you have spotted or written something about Node.js and io.js, do come over to our Evangelism team repo and suggest it on the Issues page, specifically the Weekly Updates issue.

Upcoming Events

• BrazilJS Conf tickets are on sale, August 21st — 22nd at Shopping Center BarraShoppingSul
• NodeConf EU tickets are on sale, September 6th — 9th at Waterford, Ireland
• Node.js Italian Conference tickets are on sale, October 10th at Desenzano — Brescia, Italy
• JSConf CO, October 16th — 17th at Ruta N, Medellin

Have an event about Node.js and io.js coming up? You can put your events here through the Evangelism team repo and announce it in the Issues page, specifically the Weekly Updates issue.

io.js and Node.js News — August 7th was originally published in Node & JavaScript on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.