We open-sourced 90 node.js modules at Browserling | Hacker News Reader

We open-sourced 90 node.js modules at Browserling

catonmat.net

277 pointspkrumins32 comments

James and Peteris are two of the most amazing devs I've seen in a long time. They ship and ship and ship and ship.

The first version of StackVM (Browserling's underlying technology) was written in Haskell. They switched to Node close to two years ago if I'm not mistaken. I've gotten an early look at Testling, their cross browser testing web testing tools, and they're easily a year or two ahead of anyone else on the market. I'm looking forward to seeing it launch.

Hook James and Peteris up by purchasing a paid plan: http://browserling.com/pricing

Better yet, ping them about buying a corporate plan for your company: http://browserling.com/contact

They are amazing and Browserling is very handy, but they really need to hire a designer. A lot of their customers are going to be designers, there is no reason to have such a dated look.

I agree. It's a shame to have such a forward looking product be encased in such dated design

I also agree. First time I came across their product it wasn't via HN and at first I just assumed they were one of the old-timers who were trying to be quirky with "cool" icons. Otherwise, good job on the product!

What do you mean by 'old-timers'?

Browser testing sites that have been around since the early days of it becoming important.

I assume that the look is deliberate. Trying to look quirky and different with a bit of nostalgia thrown in. Or something like that.

It's all James's own artwork. Frankly, I love it.

Most of these are small utilities (e.g. node-mkdirp), but a few are really significant contributions to the Node community. node-bigint, for instance, is a very robust, efficient library for doing infinite-precision arithmetic (a fairly common necessity, since every number in JavaScript is a 64-bit float and there's no way of knowing when you lose precision).

I would question my choice of platform if I had to develop 90 modules for it.

I like how everyone was drawn for NPM top. Got their likeness on point ha-ha. I wonder how many of these can be grouped in to a general utility package?

90 is an astounding number of useful node modules :)

♥

my stack is full of those modules!

Great that these are individual modules instead of just making a single "browserling" package.

Dang, Peteris! You and James just keep cranking it out. Looking forward to Testling.

What's sad with this is that most of these modules would work in a browser if only they used asynchronous module definition.

That would have been even more awesome.

https://github.com/substack/node-browserify

these guys competed in the Node Knockout! You can see (and vote) for the browserling guys here http://nodeknockout.com/teams/replicants#votes

Truely amazing

I know I'm getting to be a broken record, but two different attempts at an SSH server, neither of which work? Every other thing on this list is a reimplementation of something in Python's standard library or Twisted.

I mean, yes, that's a lot of code to write, and I'm impressed, but this just feels like yet more reinvention of the wheel.

I think that's the point. Nodejs is a new technology and people are re-inventing all the Twisted (and other technologies like it) wheels so that you can use them from nodejs.

It's a Javascript interpreter/JITer/whatever. What is new about that?

It's a javascript environment that doesn't suck. Heyoooo!

Where would we all be today if we never improved on the first wheel?

JavaScript runs client side on the web. Python doesn't.

1. You win. This contribution make me think there needs to be an open source awards show. Your "best contribution to a web platform in 2011" nomination is in the bag.

2. PG should be calling you with an invitation to the next YC class, not for this, but for everything you guys have accomplished in the last year.

Agree with both points, especially the second. Their product and work feels like a great fit for YC.

BTW, nirvana: at the risk of down-votes here I wanted to draw your attention to this comment I made on an older thread which you might not have noticed: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2958684

Please follow me on twitter. I'll be announcing blogs and email addresses in the near future.

Already have! OK, I'll keep an eye out for updates.

Thanks for pointing that out. I completely missed that wonderful thread.

EDIT: I agree with amirhhz. Nirvana, if you have a blog or newsletter, please let me know. The only info I found from HN & googling you is twitter @NirvanaCore, which I am looking forward it, but I don't want to just know about NirvanaCore from you. I want to read and know about you and your thoughts.

Congrats!

Incidentally, anyone have an idea how I can profile my Node app to see where I'm using up memory and CPU resources?

There are debugging, profiling and coverage tools though they're maybe not as well-developed as you'd like.

If you have any node questions, you should drop by the #node.js channel on freenode! It's a good place to get help and chat about asynchronous IO with (generally) friendly people.

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