Engine Yard, Microsoft Launch Node.js Offerings

Node.js continues to catch on with developers and vendors alike, as recently both Microsoft and Engine Yard announced support for the platform.

In a recent blog post, Dr. Nic Williams, vice president of engineering at Engine Yard, said the company has added support for Node.js to its existing support for Ruby on Rails and PHP applications that run on the Engine Yard cloud.

“Starting today, Engine Yard is enabling early access support for Node.js applications on Engine Yard Cloud,” Williams said. “Node.js is a popular event-driven framework written in JavaScript that is ideal for low-latency, real-time applications. Node.js has a growing, active and self-motivated community that reminds us of the time when we started with Ruby. We love that energy, and so do our customers.”

Now every Engine Yard Cloud customer—including Free Trial customers—will be able to take advantage of Node.js features, Williams said. This feature is being delivered through a new program called Engine Yard Labs, he added.

The new Engine Yard Labs program is a place for Engine Yard, with the help of the developer community, to try out experimental new features and capabilities on the Engine Yard platform.

Meanwhile, Microsoft announced the release of the first stable build of Node.js on Windows earlier in November.

“This comes some four months after our June 23rd announcement that Microsoft was working with Joyent to port Node.js to Windows,” said Claudio Caldato, principal program manager of the Interoperability Strategy Team at Microsoft, in a blog post. “Since then we’ve been heads down writing code.”

Added Caldato:

“This accomplishment is the result of a great collaboration with Joyent and its team of developers. With the dedicated team of Igor Zinkovsky, Bert Belder and Ben Noordhuis under the leadership of Ryan Dahl, we were able to implement all the features that let Node.js run natively on Windows.”