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
The Red Hat Node.js team continues to represent Red Hat as one of the most active companies contributing to the community Node.js project. From our leadership on the Technical Steering Committee, keeping the build infrastructure in place, taking on security triage rotations and helping with releases, the team continues to be highly engaged. In addition to the “keep the project running” work we are also active members of the Node-API team team, and help lead forward-thinking efforts like the Next 10 effort.
The team is also very active in the v8 upstream that Node.js depends on, keeping V8 running on PPC and s390 architectures which is a big portion of the team’s overall work.
Supporting our Customers
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.
Red Hat build of Node.js
The Node.js team works closely with the RHEL team that ships the Red Hat build of Node.js with the most recent release being Node.js 22.This year we continued to investigate and resolve issues raised by our customers, including investigating and fixing issues in the community Node.js project so that we minimize the differences between the community Node.js releases and the Red Hat build of Node.js. If you are a Red Hat customer we look forward to supporting you with issues you might run into.
Tested and Verified
Most JavaScript applications need more than just the Node.js runtime. In order to minimize risks for our customers the team runs the test for some key modules on UBI with the Red Hat Build of Node.js so that we are confident they run well on our platform. You can check out the list in the documentation for “Tested and Verified”
These days it seems everybody is trying out and experimenting with large language models and AI and this includes Node.hs developers. While the module is not yet in our official Tested and Verified listing, we have added the popular AI framework langchain.js to our platforms test suite so we can make sure it works effectively with our platforms.
Node Modules
The team is also responsible for keeping some key modules up-to-date. These modules include opossum, faas-js-runtime and kube-service-bindings.
Similar to previous years, both the faas-js-runtime and opossum modules saw multiple community contributions that added value to these frameworks. The list of releases for these two modules can be found here and here. Thanks again to those community members that contributed their time and effort .
Node.js Reference Architecture
In 2023 we “completed” work on both the Node.js Reference Architecture and its companion blog series. In 2024 we were able to take those 18(!) posts and make an E-book, A Developer's Guide to the Node.js Reference Architecture.
We have also continued on with our next phase, a reference architecture for the web. While not as complete as its Node.js counterpart, we have made some progress over the past year.
Our team also had the opportunity to contribute to the “The Nine Node Pillars”. The Node.js reference architecture has a lot of suggestions on how to properly handle those pillars as outlined in The nine Node.js pillars and the Node.js reference architecture.
UBI Buildpacks
Most Red Hat customers will be familiar with S2i, but there are other ways to bundle Node.js applications into containers. In the past year the Node.js team continued to work on improving support for UBI in the Paketo buildpacks If you want to learn more about using UBI with the Paketo buildpacks check out this series - https://developers.redhat.com/articles/2024/06/18/build-applications-paketo-buildpacks-and-red-hat-ubi-container-images.
AI
Like many other companies, AI was a focus for us this year too. TypeScript and JavaScript are often the second language supported by libraries used to interact with large language models (for example Langchain, Ollama, Llamaindex). The team focused not only on the getting started experience for Node.js developers, but also covered some more advanced topics in the AI space such as Retrieval Augmented Generation(RAG),Tools, and agents.
A great round up of our AI posts can be found in this article. To learn more about our team's AI involvement, check out our Node.js AI topic page.
For those that have been using the AI Lab extension with Podman desktop, there is now a new Node.js chatbot recipe that members of the team created.
Content
This past year saw a variety of new blog content published to the Red Hat Developer site. Not only did we publish many new AI related articles, as mentioned previously, but we also added a few new learning paths, such as this one: Develop cloud-native Node.js applications with Express.js.
Plans for this year are no different. We will continue to post our Node.js and AI related articles as well as other enterprise content that Node.js developers have come to expect from our team.
Conferences
Similar to last year, the team was back to presenting talks. As usual, members of the team were present at the “Big” conference, Nodeconf.EU. We also participated in both Node.js Collaborators summits. The first was in London in the Spring, while the second was located in Dublin in the Fall.
See the following articles covering our participation at these conferences:
Looking forward to 2025
In 2025, we’ll continue to be active in the community, supporting the planned new major releases of Node.js 24 and 25. We’ll also be continuing to develop our Web Reference Architecture and much more.
Happy new year from the Node.js team at Red Hat!
