Codepope's Development Hell

This article was imported from the original CodeScaling blog

It’s not really a surprise, but after just over six months since the “forking” of both Node.js and Docker, the two different projects have ended up back in some sort of alignment. For Node.js, it was the reunification with io.js under the Node.js Foundation, which was officially launched under the Linux Foundation’s umbrella. The Node.js and io.js technical development is now driven by a technical committee and hopefully this will all work out well for all.

First up, Rust has reached version 1.0, though this is an announcement that was hardly unexpected. It has a lot to live up to given the Rust web site goes for such unloaded language as “blazingly fast, prevents nearly all segfaults, and guarantees thread safety”. The real test for Rust, at least for me, is how well Servo, Mozilla’s browser written in Rust and the application Rust was created with in mind.

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 was that 3.0 version change which woke people up from the Linux 2.x problem, where scripts assumed Linux versions began with a 2 and, lets be honest, it wasn’t really a problem. If you have scripts which are assuming 3.x version numbers on your Linux builds, find the person who wrote them and sit them down for a “conversation” because there’s no way that that kind of assumption is excusable after only four years.

In this Snippets, 6to5 becomes Babel, Node.js 0.12 on Pi, Git 2.3, HTTP2 explained and regular expressions from chained methods. Node.js 0.12 on a Pi - If you’re trying to build Node.js on your older Raspberry Pi, you may have problems. Not now - Thanks to Conor O’Neill who has built Node.js getting around a problem with identifying the version of ARM processor by… applying some patches from io.js. You can download the built version from his blog… which will save you many hours of build time.