It’s been almost a month since we announced our plans to be “The Open Source Languages Company” and add four new language distributions to our stack. And, this is my final of four posts outlining why we chose the languages we are adding to our offering; hopefully it will help readers understand why we truly are THE Open Source Languages Company. We’ve renewed our focus on open source languages, support, and we’ve announced we’ll be building ActiveRuby™, ActiveNode™, ActiveLua™ and ActiveGo™ in 2017. These languages will be in addition to our already-popular ActivePerl, ActivePython, ActiveTcl, and Komodo IDE offerings.

Why Node.js?

When we set out to decide what languages to add to our language distribution offering, we kept a series of criteria in mind: the languages had to be truly open source, have an active community with ongoing releases, and high growth rate (among others). Node.js definitely fits that criteria, and although it’s not “the new kid on the block” it is becoming more integral to more companies and projects daily. We’re here to grow and support the language as it expands its reach, and give back to the community where we can.

Node.js has been embraced for development of apps that will run JavaScript on both the server and client side, but there’s more to it than meets the eye. Companies like PayPal, Netflix, Uber, Wells Fargo and Intuit have already embraced Node within a variety of their development teams, and a wide range of developers across all industries already use Node for server-side and web development, microservices/APIs, streaming applications, and more.

According to the April 2016 Node.js Foundation Survey, “With over 3.5 million users and an annual growth rate of 100 percent, Node.js is emerging as a universal platform used for web applications, IoT, and enterprise.” They released a great infographic that also depicts that of those surveyed, 90% of use it for web app development, and 42% use it for enterprise development. From our recent conversations with both communities and existing customers, we can attest that indeed the use of Node.js is becoming more and more widespread within enterprises.

So far we’ve had lots of great feedback from the Node.js community–please keep your feedback coming to our Director of. Product Management Jeff Rouse jrouse@activestate.com! We welcome all feedback (good or bad, individual or corporate, or whatever is on your mind.)

ActiveNode: Coming Soon

We’re proud to say that in 2017 we will be providing a community- and enterprise-ready Node.js distribution on a variety of platforms, shaped in part by the feedback we receive from the community, enterprises, and anyone else who cares to weigh in. We want to hear what your favorite features are, your favorite modules, what you like to do with the language.

ActiveState Komodo IDE (and open source Komodo Edit) already supports web devs extensively, including Node.js. Our intention is to make Node.js stronger–both internally in our offerings, and also for the community that has already been rallying around the language.

If you would like to ask any questions or provide thoughts on where we can best help the Node.js community (or your specific enterprise), feel free to email us , or you can sign up to our mail list for advanced notice of when our first distribution is available:
/node.

We look forward to hearing from you.