Node Roundup: 0.6.5, NodeUp, Logme, Consolidate.js, mdoc, Firmata, Nodeflakes
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modules
podcasts
logging
templating
arduino
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You can send your Node modules and articles in for review through our contact form or @dailyjs.
Node 0.6.5
Node 0.6.5 is out, which upgrades V8 to 3.6.6.11 and potentially avoids national firewall-related issues.
NodeUp
NodeUp is a podcast all about Node. In NodeUp Nine features Isaac Z. Schlueter, Matt Ranney, Dominic Tarr, and James Halliday discussing scaling, deployment, and Erlang. Other topics include migrating to Node 0.6 and hosting on Joyent with Solaris.
Subscribe with either iTunes or RSS:
Logme
Logme (License: MIT, npm: logme) by Veselin Todorov is a slick little logging library. Basic usage looks like this:
var logme = require('logme');
logme.critical('Error');
It has a lot of colour themes, which are set by instantiating a Logme object:
var Logme = require('logme').Logme;
, logme = new Logme({ theme: 'smile' });
logme.error('This is now themed.');
The only thing I miss is the ability to quickly append values with spaces, like this: console.log('Value:', value);.
It’s worth remembering that console also comes with console.error, which will write to stderr.
Consolidate.js
Consolidate.js (License: MIT, npm: consolidate) by TJ Holowaychuk is a wrapper that gives template engines the same API. TJ’s documentation mentions that Express 3.x uses the signature (path[, locals], callback) for template rendering, which is the same as Consolidate.js.
This library adds a thin layer that makes it easier to switch between different template engines.
mdoc
mdoc (License: MIT, npm: mdoc) by Miller Medeiros is a markdown-based documentation generator. It’ll create HTML files for each markdown file in a directory, and a table of contents.
One of the author’s examples is unofficial Node mdoc-generated documentation. He’s only been working on it for a few weeks, yet the style of the documentation it generates is readable and suits larger projects.
Some projects benefit handcrafted documentation rather than JSDoc-style API documentation. Miller wrote a post about this topic called Inline Documentation: Why I’m Ditching it.
Firmata
Firmata (GitHub: jgautier / firmata, License: MIT, npm: firmata) by Julian Gautier is a library for interacting with Arduino boards running the firmata protocol.
If you’re a Node developer you may find this more appealing than typical Arduino code:
var firmata = require('firmata')
, board;
board = new firmata.Board('path to usb', function() {
// Arduino is ready to communicate
});
Nodeflakes
Nick Payne sent in Nodeflakes (GitHub: makeusabrew / nodeflakes), a Twitter Streaming API experiment that displays CSS3 unicode snowflakes that display tweets. The architecture is actually multiprocess, using a producer/consumer architecture. The client-side code is in nodeflakes-client.
Despite appearing to be a holiday-themed gimmick, Nodeflakes is very educational. The author has written a detailed blog post about the project: Nodeflakes – real time tweet powered snowflakes.
