Everyone's talking about node.js, and for good reason. The opportunity to achieve drastically better performance and use just one programming language for both web servers and web browsers is not something anyone would want to miss. We have clients who are excited about the performance improvements that Node development can deliver. And we're excited that Node liberates us from constantly switching mental gears between JavaScript and other languages on the server side. It's a bit of a love-in, really.
MongoDB is another indication of JavaScript's new popularity on the server side. MongoDB is a better, simpler and faster alternative to SQL databases for many purposes. Like node.js, MongoDB uses JavaScript internally, making it an intuitive choice for JavaScript developers.
So we've been busy building projects with Node and MongoDB, releasing open source components to enhance them, and blogging up a storm about it. Here are some of our recent offerings:
stagecoach helps you deploy Node and MongoDB projects to your existing servers. Wile Nodejitsu and Heroku offer dedicated Node hosting options that are well worth checking out, Stagecoach is a good choice for those who already have system administration skills and would like to leverage inexpensive VPS hosting or just host an app on a private server.
mongoose-uniqueslugs helps create good "slugs" for blog posts, photo collections, and most anything else that might need a URL of its own. This lets us point to articles with URLs like /posts/welcome-aboard, rather than using cryptic IDs. If a second post titled "Welcome Aboard" is added, the "slug" for the new post is automatically adjusted to be distinct from the first post. Our offering is a plugin for mongoose, an object-oriented wrapper for MongoDB created by the smart folks at LearnBoost. Naturally mongoose-uniqueslugs can be installed with npm, the official package manager for Node.
whiskers.js is a page template language for JavaScript (including Node), developed by Gabriel Farrell, who joined the P'unk Avenue team recently. Gabriel brings a great deal of Node experience to the P'unk Avenue team and we're excited to have him with us. whiskers is also available through npm.
Finally, justjs.com is a personal project of mine (that is, Tom's): an autobiographical, beginner-friendly blog and tutorial about Node development, focused on the idea that you can work entirely in JavaScript without making sacrifices.
Our new enthusiasm for Node is partly due to the recent Node Philly conference. We're excited to be a part of the growing Node developer community in Philadelphia.
