London Node.js User Group

Last night we attended the inaugural London Node User Group or to those in the know l-nug #lnug. We have been experimenting with node.js internally here all year and are extremely excited by the prospects it may hold for our clients and us in the future, aside from the fact we love all things javascript and who wouldn’t want to write asynchronous code….

The event was hosted and sponsored by the fine chaps at Forward in their rather swanky Camden offices and kicked off with a lovely round of free drinks and pizza (courtesy of Forward), some great informal networking and discussions surrounding the likes of the new Kindle Silk browser and Facebook’s plans to take over the world. A good warm up to get the brains ticking for the night’s 3 main talks:

Forward’s own Andy Kent started the night with: “Real time data analysis over unbounded streams” a look into the libraries he has been producing internally at Forward for real-time keyword data analysis specifically his Creek streaming aggregator used in production to track popular words and urls across different data streams. We were particularly impressed to see it being benchmarked in production environments clocking 500 hits a second without even flinching.

Garren Smith gave a very insightful talk “These are the ORM’s you are looking for” discussing a few options you have for ORM’s in node to create abstraction layers between your code and your lovely NoSQL db’s for object relational mapping bliss (and we are big fan’s of ORMs). Specifically LazyBoy which he wrote for couch (our personal favorite NoSQL) and we have used for personal projects. Bringing support for defaults, CRUD, relationships (hasmany e.t.c) and couch view goodness.

Rob Tweed finished the night with a rather controversial (well at least at a node group) talk on the Globals database, a very reliable high performance in-process (i.e. no network layer) NoSQL database (tongue twister) that predates the NoSQL era, abstracted from Caché db. My favorite quote of the night was from Rob, when discussing getting into node.js:

If Douglas Crockford is talking about it, then it must be good!

Not for the faint hearted, Globals is a extremely low-level storage engine for which you have to write your api’s yourself, even indexing! However, this allows you to be a lot more flexible in creating your db’s. Rob’s interesting point was that after a lot of testing and benchmarking he found that when using Globals and “blocking” on high performace enterprise level projects, synchronous db calls where faster than the as aysnc possibilities node gives us. This led into a great Q&A session from the all the aync fan boys in the room.

After the event we all headed to the grand union for some post-event discussion, where I discussed the possibility of using Node in some upcoming mobile projects we have, with some great ideas coming from people for real life uses for sockets and node in mobile development, so watch this space.

Overall the event was a great start to what – we hope – will be long running user group, a great community of people all pushing the technology to new and exciting places. Firmly rooting the fact that server side javascript is here to stay, and is ready for production use! A massive thanks to Andrew Nesbitt and Andy Kent and Forward for being great hosts. We’re always happy to meet new friends in the london tech scene so why not follow us on twitter: UV^d Patrick Hamann

I will update the post once the slides/videos for the night have been released.

UPDATE: Forwards Flickr photoset from the night.
UPDATE: Video of Andy Kent’s talk “Real time data analysis over unbounded streams”

This post was written by Patrick on September 29, 2011 at 10:17 am

Native App beta testing with TestFlight

The prototype of our latest mobile App has flown the nest with the help of the very useful iOS beta testing software TestFlight which is proving to be a great tool during our distribution, testing and UAT cycles.

Patrick discovered TestFlight during the end of our phase 1 development of a mobile betting application for one of our clients ABETA International. As we’ve mentioned before, we build mobile web applications and native mobile applications using the SenchaTouch Framework; enabling us to produce intuitive mobile user experiences (UX) and user interfaces (UI) with the expertise and technology we have gained over years designing and building websites. Not wishing to repeat myself too much (it’s all here) we then package this up using PhoneGap for delivery to iPhone, iPad or Android devices.

One of the hurdles once the App is ready for client testing, bug testing or user acceptance testing (UAT) and the subsequent rounds of incremental version releases is how to achieve this in the most efficient way possible: obviously with website and web applications it’s a matter of setting up a staging or testing environment and providing a link, following that can be several rounds of testing – bug fixing – testing (I have paraphrased this process for illustration purposes only) but with Apps it’s a bit harder as we have to be able to distribute the App to the devices that our developers, clients and testers are using and in the case of our clients they are not in our office.

TestFlight is brilliant for this; from a single entry point you can distribute to predefined groups, set up new users within a group and create custom distribution lists to send new builds over the ‘air’. In simple terms, we can release a new iteration of an App and it gets distributed to the group who are alerted to the new version. Users can send feedback directly through the app (with in-app questions using their new SDK) or by replying directly to TestFlight automated emails, and this feedback is distributed to the developers assigned.

Its early days and we have only scratched the surface of what TestFlight can do but I thought I’d give my first impressions as it might be of use to others.

This post was written by Kirsten on September 22, 2011 at 8:57 pm

London JS: node.js & express.js

Last night we attended our 3rd London JS meetup, held at the offices of the event sponsor Poke, in Shoreditch.

Hungry from another busy start to the week, we were once again pleasantly surprised by Poke’s generosity who had provided 15 (we counted) Papa John’s pizzas and enough Peroni to put a Pizza Express to shame. There were 3 talks on the agenda + we had been particularly looking forward to hearing what the speakers had to say about Node.js.

Paul Kinlan started proceedings discussing and demoing LeviRoutes, a javascript routing framework he had built for Google.io. Using the HTML 5 History API, this looks like a bloomin’ useful bit of kit when you’re developing single page apps.

Alex Young then gave us a great account of implementing Node.js + Express in the real world, providing some particularly useful + comical tips on how/when to persuade a client that node is the way forward.

Michael Smith ended the evening with his introduction to Nodejs, discussing the wider applications (other than as an HTTP server) that node is suited to and even fitting in some live coding before his battery run out!

Another great event from London JS, thanks guys…looking forward to the next one!

This post was written by Rob on September 20, 2011 at 12:53 pm