Node Knockout

This past weekend was the Node Knockout competition, during which 215 teams had 48 hours to build a complete NodeJS application. The entries (which skew pretty heavily towards games and chat apps) show off a lot of what you can do with Node’s fully non-blocking, asynchronous I/O API.

Voting is over now, but I’ve got to admit that I’m awfully partial to Tweet Quest, which even got a sweet write-up in TechCrunch! (Go Team Rocketpants!).

NodeKO was definitely an interesting experiment, since it was likely a lot of people’s first attempt at building something non-trivial in Node. In the coming weeks, I’m guessing we’ll see a lot of blog posts chronicling the joys and pains that different teams felt while creating their entries. That’s something that can only improve the Node experience for everybody, so it’s definitely something to look forward to.

PlayRelay

Speaking of Node and gaming, PlayRelay is a service that handles the server-side component of multiplayer iOS games. The idea is that you can update as much of the Node-based server component of your application as much as you want without having to push updates to the iOS client application. And since PlayRelay is fully hosted, they’ll worry about load and scaling for you, so when you get to the “Angry Birds” level of success, you can rest easy knowing that your uptime and performance won’t suffer. The service isn’t free, but if you’re pretty comfortable with Cocoa and with Node, this could be a great way to manage your development resources.

Mastering Node

Mastering Node is a new open-source eBook by Node community superstar TJ Holowaychuck. It’s very much a work in progress, so there are a lot of empty chapters. Still, a lot of core Node APIs are covered, and it’s nice to have another resource for those besides just the API docs. So while Mastering Node isn’t in a state yet where it’s going to help anybody, well, master Node, it’s already going to be useful to a lot of people. Over time, the content will surely get fleshed out, and ultimately become a great resource for Node hackers.

Flow Control in npm

Isaac Z. Schlueter, another Node luminary, also did his part this week to help folks get up to speed on Node best practices. His post on the How to Node blog, “Flow Control in npm”, is a great, detailed explanation of some design patterns that Schlueter used in developing npm. The patterns are meant to help you tame the fully asynchronous, callback-heavy code that Node demands. If you’re ready to move past “Hello World” in Node, this post is probably pretty essential reading.