Javascript server Node.js moves to 0.2.0

The JavaScript-executing, event-driven network application server, Node.js, has been updated to version 0.2.0. The release sees a number of bug fixes, including a 100% CPU usage bug with OpenSSL, and an upgrade to the V8 JavaScript engine that underlies Node.js. The up-and-coming library is gaining attention with developers wanting to create scalable web services using JavaScript at the server side, using the same language as they use in the browser and to possibly share code between the browser and the server.

Inspired by frameworks such as Ruby's Event Machine or Python's Twisted, Node.js avoids thread based networking and moves to an event driven model, where one thread executes all the code as demanded by events, such as the opening of network connections, or the completion of I / O operations. This has the advantage of being memory efficient and avoiding dead-lock issues, as there are no locks. Within Node.js code, HTTP is a first class protocol, with a library designed to allow for the handing of streamed data through the framework.

The 0.2.0 release of Node.js has been tested on Linux, Macintosh and Solaris and also runs on Windows, FreeBSD and OpenBSD. The source can be downloaded from the Node.js site. Python 2.4 or better is required to build Node.js and the V8 engine (on which Node.js is built) only supports ARM and 32-bit and 64-bit Intel architectures. Node.js is licensed under a number of licences; V8 is under a BSD licence and other components are under the GPL2 or MIT licences, while the overall licence is an MIT like licence.

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