Gergely Nemeth Co-Founder of RisingStack, EM at Uber

A lot has been happening to the Node.js community in the past months - let's see what these were and what's coming.

The Convergence

January 2015

io.js 1.0 was released in January, 2015 - bringing ES6/ES2015 to the Node community with regular releases and proper SemVer.

June 2015

In June 2015 Node.js and io.js announced that they were willing to join forces again - with the help of the Linux Foundation.

September 2015

After months of hard work Node.js 4 was released on 8th of September, the first release with the merged codebase. This release contained the up-to-date version of the V8 JavaScript engine (v4.5). This version includes support for:

block scoping,

classes,

typed arrays,

generators,

Promises,

Symbols,

template strings,

collections (Map, Set, etc.) and

arrow functions.

With this release, first-class support for ARM processors also got introduced to Node.js. New releases are now tested on a huge cluster of machines running the most popular operating systems for Node.js.

NPM Version 3

Later releases of Node.js will be bundled with NPM version 3, which is great news for Windows users. Why? NPM 3 uses a flat dependency tree, solving a problem that caused an issue on Windows with long path names.

The new codebase for the merged project can be found here: https://github.com/nodejs/node

The Node.js Foundation

The mission of the foundation (which is part of the Linux Foundation) is to enable the even bigger adoption of Node.js using an open governance model that encourages participation. Currently the project has more contributors than ever.

To date companies like IBM, Microsoft, PayPal or RedHat joined.

But the Foundation is not for enterprises only - individual memberships are also available. These members will elect two representatives to the Board of Directors in January 2016. They will represent the need of the Node.js community in the Foundation.

Long-Term Support (LTS)

What's special about Node.js v4.2 is that this is the first LTS release of the framework - the codename is "Argon". Starting 12th October 2015, this release will be supported for 30 months. In the first 18 months it will be actively supported, and then it moves to maintenance mode, meaning only security issues and severe bugs will be fixed.

Major LTS versions will be released once every year - of course, each LTS release will have multiple incremental releases for patches.

Node 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 in cooperation with the Linux Foundation.

The first Node Interactive will be held on the 8th-9th of December 2015 in Portland. The conference brings together a wide range of community, projects, products and companies showing Node.js broad adoption by the industry.

The agenda includes speakers like:

Charlie Robbins from GoDaddy,

Yunong Xiao from Netflix,

Chris Bailey from IBM,

and a lot more amazing speakers.

Node.js is Enterprise-Ready

Our recently published white paper aims to address questions of Node.js adoption into enterprise organizations.

Read the White Paper: https://risingstack.com/resources/nodejs-is-enterprise-ready