Connect

Tim Caswell and TJ Holowaychuck, both of whom are members of the ExtJS team, have just released Connect: a middleware framework for NodeJS. In his blog post announcing Connect, Caswell cites Ruby’s Rack as an inspiration for the project.

A Connect server runs a set of middleware modules, each of which performs a specific action when it receives a particular type of message. When a request comes in to the server, each module in turn will see if it can do anything with the request and then pass it to the next module in the stack. The process is repeated in reverse with the server’s response on the way out.

Connect ships with a several stock modules that handle tasks such as authentication, logging, routing, serving static files, and even automatically generating CSS from SaSS stylesheets.

An important thing to understand about Connect is that it is not a web application framework in the traditional sense. You might, however, think of Connect as being a toolkit on which to base a web application framework. I’d wager that we’ll see several such frameworks built for Node using Connect in the coming months.

This is a really exciting project, and it has the potential to really change how the Node community builds applications. Big congratulations to Tim and TJ on this release.

Wu.js

Another functional programming-inspired Javascript library? Heck yeah! Wu.js takes the ball from other functional libraries (such as underscore.js and Functional.js) and carries it even further in following the functional paradigm.

In addition to all of the tropes that many of the functional libraries implement (currying, map/reduce, etc.), Wu has a rich set of iterator methods that give you several interesting permutations on the standard map/reduce patterns. Even better, Wu’s iterators are lazy, so you can go ahead and create one, but any code that it contains will only be executed when you want a value from it.

Seriously, I love this stuff. As long as people keep writing libraries like this, I’ll keep writing about them.

New blogs!

A couple of new blogs have popped up recently that should be of interest to JSMag readers. Badass Javascript showcases the kind of over-the-top awesome work that you’d expect to see on a blog with that name. Personally, I’m pretty partial to the post on the line-breaking algorithm.

Another great new resource is Microsoft’s ScriptJunkie. This site focuses more on tutorials & exposition than news, per se. They’ve already got some great content up, so definitely head over and check it out.

TXJS

Lastly, just a quick note of congratulation to Rebecca Murphey and the YayQuery team for putting on TXJS last weekend. I wasn’t able to go, but based on the tweets I was jealously reading, it seems like it was a great event. A lot of the speakers have posted their slides, so even if you weren’t there, you can still get something from the event. I’m saying this from experience, since Connect & Wu.js were both announced and/or promoted at TXJS.