News from the Node.js Ecosystem

Last month members of the Node.js ecosystem came together in Amsterdam for the first European version of Node.js Interactive.

Audience at Node.js Interactive Europe, which took place in Amsterdam in September.

Node.js Project members gave us a sneak peek at what’s to come with the release lines, and enterprise users and vendors working with Node.js shared best practices around the tools, training and other services being used to optimize the platform. On the final day of Node.js Interactive, two of the biggest projects connected to Node.js — Express and npm — provided attendees with detailed updates.

What’s New with Express
With 53+ million downloads in the last two years, Express has become one of the key toolkits for building web applications. Express serves as a structural base for some of the most significant projects that support Node.js, including kraken.js, a secure and scalable layer that extends Express and is heavily used by enterprises; the popular blogging framework Ghost; Sails.js, a web framework that makes it easy to build custom, enterprise-grade Node.js apps; Loopback, a Node.js API framework; and many, many more.

Doug Wilson, the rock of the Express community, gave a State of the Union for the Express project. Here’s a snapshot of what Doug mentioned:

• Express is comprised of three different Github organizations: expressjs: the fast, minimalist web framework for Node.js; pillarjs: the BYO HTTP framework, framework; jshttp: low-level JavaScript HTTP-related modules.
• The roadmap for the release of version 5.0 aims to include: native promise support in routing; an improved template rendering system; improved query string handling; new route syntax additions; and decomposed project structure.
• Doug also introduced us to the core contributors of Express and to the project’s Technical Committee:

Technical Committee members of the Express project.

You can catch more from Doug’s presentation here.

New Versions for npm

Kat Marchan, a key CLI Engineer at npm, gave us an update on what’s to come with npm. Here’s a quick overview and update:

• Version 3 of npm has greatly changed since its first adoption. The reliability has greatly increased in the newest version and it is already shipping with Node.js v6, which is going into Node.js LTS next week.
• Version 4 of npm will be available sometime in late October. This new release will address a few small changes. Key details include: modifications with flagging enhancements in npm-dispatch; more capabilities with npm-search and category sorting; differences with the prepublish feature in npm-prepare (the prepublish script will be deprecated and replaced with ‘prepare’ script).
• As for version 5 of npm, there are plans to do a major redesign of shrinkwrap. This version should be available early next year.

Slide from Kat’s presentation around npm v5.

Kat also shared information about long-term support and how npm plans to handle cases in the future. You can view the full presentation on npm here.

More Updates to Come at Node.js Interactive North America
We are excited to have another round of knowledge sharing just around the corner at Node.js Interactive North America. If you weren’t able to make it to Europe, join us November 29 — December 2 in Austin, TX. You’ll learn more about how you can best use Node.js in your enterprise and get a better understanding of evolving trends in the Node.js and JavaScript ecosystem.

Here’s a detailed schedule of what will be happening: http://events.linuxfoundation.org/events/node-interactive/program/agenda

See you there!