ReadWriteWeb

There's a substantial amount of buzz and enthusiasm right now about Node.js. So what is it, and why should you care about it (well, other than "I said so")?

ReadWriteWeb chatted with Javascript developer Guillermo Rauch, co-founder and CTO of LearnBoost in order to get some insights.

Twitter announced plans to roll out a new Status ID generator, Snowflake back in June, and a message to third-party developers yesterday explains the some of the problems and some of the "next steps" on the path to Snowflake's implementation.

The need for Snowflake comes as part of Twitter's move from MySQL to Cassandra, as the latter has no built-in way of generating unique IDs. These Tweet IDs are unique 64bit unsigned integers. Currently IDs are assigned sequentially, based on time. The full ID is composed of a timestamp, a worker number, and a sequence number.

Mozilla just announced the launch of Kraken, a new JavaScript benchmark. The Mozilla team notes that developers spend a lot of time optimizing their code to improve the browser's performance on certain benchmarks, but these improvement often don't actually create a better user experience. According to Mozilla engineer Rob Sayre, Kraken instead focuses on recreating "realistic workloads and forward-looking applications."

Across the board, all major browser developers are currently working very hard to speed up their software's performance. While a lot of the focus has currently shifted to hardware acceleration, there are still some speed gains to be made by optimizing most browsers' JavaScript engines. Earlier this year, the Mozilla JavaScript team launched the Jaegermonkey project in order to speed up the JavaScript performance of Firefox, and today, the team launched the first preview version of Firefox 4 with JaegerMonkey.

Last week I had the chance to attend Qualcomm's Uplinq 2010 conference in San Diego where I was able to sit it on several interesting discussions about mobile technology and its future. One of the sessions I was particularly interested in was a chat about the tools being created to improve web development optimized for mobile devices. Qualcomm engineer Bijan Amirzada showed off some interesting new capabilities within mobile Web browsers, but one assertion he made has since been stuck in my mind: will Web-based apps eventually dethrone native applications on mobile devices?

Mozilla Labs has launched a new "lifestream" platform called sudoSocial. Pulling its name from the Linux command "sudo" which allows users to run programs with other, usually elevated privileges, the sudoSocial publishing platform aims to give you both access and control over your many online identities.

Although sudoSocial would be suitable for curating any stream of content, explains the introductory blog post, in its early, still rather sparse format, it's better for personal homepages that aggregate your various feeds, like Flickr photos and blog posts, for example.

One of the most common complaints about the new iPad is that it doesn't support Flash. In a recent criticism of the device, Adobe's Adrian Ludwig writes, "Without Flash support, iPad users will not be able to access the full range of web content, including over 70% of games and 75% of video on the web." While Adobe is offering a number of workarounds, dark horse Tobey Schneider's open source HTML 5 Flash Interpreter Gordon is an ambitious project with heroic intentions.

Last month was Javascript season in Europe, with two conferences dedicated to the language that powers interactive web applications, and a third, which featured it heavily. If a common theme emerged, it was the buzz about Javascript leaping out of the browser to serve other domains, and the noise has only become louder in the aftermath.

Of all the applications outside the browser, server-side Javascript is the most alluring for reasons described in this post. An idea that would have had you laughed out of the room a few years ago is edging towards reality.

Google is open sourcing a collection of Javascript tools today that will enable developers to build faster, more powerful and more efficient web applications using some of the same code that runs Gmail, Google Maps and Docs.

Why is Google doing this? Because the more powerful web applications become, the more important Google's search, browser and nascent OS become. More relevant to developers than some grand anti-Microsoft conspiracy, though, is that some serious UI sweetness may be forthcoming.

After numerous betas and two release candidates, Opera today released the final version of Opera 10, the company's flagship desktop Internet browser. Users who skipped all the pre-release versions of Opera 10 will be pleasantly surprised with the updates that Opera has brought to its browser. These include Opera Turbo, the company's compression technology that makes surfing on slower connections more bearable, visual tabs, a smarter spell checker, and a faster rendering engine. Opera also still features a built-in email client and RSS reader.