As we start the new year it’s a good time to look back at the work of the Red Hat Node.js team over the previous year. Time goes by quickly and it’s easy to forget all the good work and useful assets that we’ve put together. The team is involved in a wide variety of work - from doing the upstream Node.js releases, keeping the V8 JavaScript engine running on Power and s390 platforms, publishing content to help Node.js developers learn and adopt Node.js, and creating guidance for enterprise Node.js deployments. Through our wide-ranging work, we have the opportunity to collaborate with many people from across the community and ecosystem.
Community Involvement
As per the regular release schedule, the Node.js project shipped two major versions in 2022. Node.js 18 was released in April and promoted to long-term support in October. Also in October, Node.js 19 was released, becoming our new current release line.
Aside from the major releases, several members of the Red Hat team have supported the upstream Node.js security releases - which can often require quick turnarounds in response to discovered issues.
Releases are only one of the areas that our team is active within the community. Behind the scenes, we help keep the infrastructure running as part of the Node.js Build Working Group, with Richard investing a lot of his time. We are also active members of the Package Maintenance Working Group, Node-API team team, and help lead forward-thinking efforts like the Next 10 effort.
While the main goal of doing this work is to support the Node.js ecosystem, it also pays dividends by keeping us up-to-date on key Node.js/JavaScript topics and technologies. It’s also a great way to build contacts with other community leaders and experts, and learn from them.
Things we shipped
While we do spend a lot of our time on community work, we also work on a number of key initiatives for Red Hat as well. This past year saw our team ship a wide range of assets and content.
Node Modules
Last year saw the release of a new node module called Kube Service Bindings - kube-service-bindings. This year saw work continue on this module by adding many new client bindings that can be used. Checkout this blog post for a more detailed update.
Serverless Functions
This year saw the team dive a little deeper into the serverless landscape with a focus on serverless functions. While this has been mostly a research effort, one small but important addition was added to the functions Node.js framework. This addition now allows users to write their serverless functions as either a Common JS (CJS) or EcmaScript Module (ESM).
Node.js Reference Architecture
The Node.js Reference Architecture was again a major focus for our team last year, working to gather and document the experience from across Red Hat and IBM based on our real-world Node.js developments and expertise. While there is still work today, we hope that in 2023, phase one of the Node.js Reference Architecture will be completed. Interested in some of the discussions that went into the reference architecture? The Introduction to the Node.js reference architecture, Part 1: Overview is a good place to start.
Conferences
2022 was the year the team started to go back to in-person conferences, with members of the team presenting talks, workshops, and assisting at booths. The two major conferences for us this year were OpenJS World 2022, which was located in Austin, TX and Nodeconf.eu, which was back to its home in Kilkenny, Ireland.
At OpenJS World, members of the team presented talks. This was also a special conference since our very own Beth Griggs won the Node.js unsung hero award, for all her thankless work in the Node.js community and beyond.
At Nodeconf.EU, the team also gave a talk as well as an informative workshop.
See the following articles covering our participation at these conferences:
Looking forward to 2023
In 2023, we’ll continue to be active in the community, supporting the planned new major releases of Node.js 20 and 21. We’ll also be continuing to develop our Node.js Reference Architecture and diving deeper into Serverless Functions.
Happy new year from the Node.js team at Red Hat!
