Codepope's Development Hell

The Arduino IDE is heading into a rather neat consolidation of the numerous Arduino inspired boards out there. The introduction of a mechanism, in version 1.6.2, to allow people to plug their boards into the IDE easily is starting to snowball. To understand why this is important, before 1.6.2’s release if you had a custom board and the tools to make it work with the IDE, then to install them involved copying files into directories, editing files and crossing fingers (and being disappointed often).

Node-RED 0.10.6: Nick O’Leary has announced Node-RED 0.10.6 with various changes to the editor, nodes and API. If you don’t know Node-RED, it’s a rather graphically splendid way of wiring the internet of stuff and stuff in general together - I did a few bits with it on here. With this release, there’s also a new command line administration tool for Node-RED so you can control nodes without having to restart the entire process….

Redis 3.0.0: Antirez (Salvatore Sanfillippo) brought us Redis 3.0.0 on April 1st (and I salute him for ignoring the worst day on the Internet by doing real things). The big thing with 3.0 is clustering, better smarter clustering that is, out of the box and good enough scalability and fault tolerance for many use cases. It’s a big jump, and it may take some iterations to nail it down but its worth it for the usefulness that Redis represents to a system architect.

Disque: Antirez ,the man behind the splendid Redis in-memory key/value store has been working away on a new message broker called Disque. He’s not released it as yet, but he is giving status updates on his progress and thinking. Redis gets used a lot as a message queue and Disque, developed by gutting then rebuilding a Redis fork, is designed with a focus on that use case. There’s plenty of message queue platforms out there, but Antirez has a good record on delivering so this is very much one to keep tabs on.

gRPC: Google, doing it’s whomp-here’s-a-“standard” thing, has just announced an open sourced remote procedure call framework called gRPC. With libraries for seven languages (C, C++, Java, Node.js, Python and Ruby are done - ObjC, PHP and C# coming), gRPC gets you to use Protocol Buffers to define the end points and serialisation and the libraries then use HTTP/2 to communicate exploiting the bidirectional streaming and multiplexing. There’s an new alpha of a version 3.

It’s kind of hard to remember when Linux last had a version upheavel like the first release candidate of Linux 4.0…. sorry, no I tell a lie, it was 22 July 2011 when Linus finally pulled the handle on Linux 2.x and released Linux 3.0. That was quite a change when you consider that the 2.x version had arrived in 1996, with 2.6 turning up in 2003 and incrementing away all the way to 2.

In this Snippets, 6to5 becomes Babel, Node.js 0.12 on Pi, Git 2.3, HTTP2 explained and regular expressions from chained methods. 6to5 becomes Babel - As ES6, the next generation JavaScript, starts arriving in browsers the 6to5 transpiler, which converts ES6 code into current ES5 code so you can run your JavaScript apps on old and new browsers, has been looking to its future and changed its name to Babel to reflect its future plans.

Back in December we saw two community splits, one in the Docker community and one in the Node.js community. It’s time to look back at both those splits. Docker 1.5 just landed with IPV6 support, read only containers, a stats API and CLI commands for streaming results and the ability to specify what Dockerfile to use when building. Good updates. Now, the other bits - There’s also an “Open Image Spec” which isn’t so much a spec as a formal declaration of whats currently implemented.

Node.js 0.12 has arrived with many long gestating changes now available. Io.js has a lot of these in already and a more up to date V8 engine for JavaScript, but if you’re sticking with Node.js releases, this is the biggy. Better more sensible streams, more HTTP sockets and keepalive, a new round robin clustering system and initial support for ECMAScript internationalisation. No, don’t go flipping your production system over to this right now, but do give it a go on your test/staging systems… it’s the future y’know.

It seems like less than a year ago when Eben Upton told Ars Technica that the Raspberry Pi Foundation was “a year or two away from thinking about” building new hardware. In less than a year, we’ve had the Model B+, the Model A+ and now, as a “Well-actually-we’ve-been-thinking-about-it-lots”, here’s the Raspberry Pi 2. The good? It’s a quad core 900Mhz A7 ARM chip, it’s got 1GB of RAM and it looks just like a Raspberry Pi B+.