Node Roundup: Node 0.3.5, express-on-railway, drty, NodeFu, maptail, Minotaur
Welcome to the Node Roundup. Send in your apps and libraries using our contact form or @dailyjs.
Please prepare yourself for a rapid-fire burst of Node news.
Node 0.3.5 Released
Node 0.3.5 has been released. The documentation is available at docs/v0.3.5/api and the source is here: node-v0.3.5.tar.gz.
See the announcement for the full list of updates.
express-on-railway
express-on-railway brings Rails-like features to Express. There’s a command line tool, railway, for creating new projects with a very familiar layout. RESTful routes can be easily set up, and there’s a neat little model system based on Redis.
It seems like an ambitious project, and if you’re familiar with the style of Rails it should be pretty easy to pick up.
drty
drty is a Django port for Node. It currently works with MySQL, and has routing, middleware, views, models, sessions, and Django templating support. There’s a blog example in the example directory.
I saw drty mentioned on Ryan Dahl’s Twitter account: @ryah: This looks awesome…
NodeFu
I’ve been looking at NodeFu, a Node-oriented hosting platform. It’s npm-friendly and deploys with git (like Heroku and Joyent’s Node SmartMachines). It’s currently free to try out, just follow the instructions on the site: NodeFu REST API.
We do not currently have a full featured website as we are focusing on the API and the service. We are currently running Node v.0.3.5 and updating all NPM modules on a weekly basis. Git is required to push your updates to Nodefu. All we ask is that you be a good steward of our service and community.
maptail
maptail by George Stagas is a Node app that can plot IP address accesses on a map. There’s a demo at live.stagas.com. It has cool graphics, which is of course why I featured it, but it also seems to be handling Hacker News traffic very well.
Minotaur
Minotaur (MIT X11 License) by Tomi is a long poll server that uses JSONP for communication. It comes with a simple chat client/server example app. The Node dependencies are fairly minimal: node-uuid, and cookie-node. The client-side uses jQuery and jquery-jsonp.
If you’re interested in seeing how the client might poll, take a look at minitaur.js. The author has written a post about the project here: Tales of the minotaur or long polling with node.js.
