While there has been a Node.js download available for RHEL and its cousins Fedora and CentOS via the Red Hat Package Manager (RPM), there was no formal support from Red Hat or Joyent (the company behind Node.js) and Node.js itself is not included in the Red Hat distribution. Besides Red Hat/CentOS release 6.3, Strongloop Node also supports:

• Debian/Ubuntu 12.10 (DEB)
• Mac OS X Mountain Lion 10.8 (PKG)
• Microsoft Windows 7 (MSI)

The official support and service that Strongloop provides could be critical for RHEL developers who want to make use of Node.js’ event-driven talents. Now if a RHEL developer has an issue or problem with Node.js he or she has to go to the mailing list for help. “Now they can get support from us and we write Node.js,” Tsang told me.

As Joyent CTO Jason Hoffman once told GigaOM, Node.js is a very good way to write high-performance servers that need to handle APIs and facilitate very fast data ingress and egress. Those are attributes that might come in handy for enterprise developers.

Strongloop’s news comes the same day Node.js v. 10.0 debuted.

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Essentially, Telefonica will start selling FeedHenry’s platform to its European enterprise customers with Instant Servers providing the hosting piece. Technologically, the two platforms are fairly well aligned — FeedHenry uses Node.js for integration with its back-end systems, and the Joyent-based Instant Servers platform uses Node.js SmartMachine virtual machines. Predictably, the two companies talk in their statement about “sharing a vision for cloud computing”.

“We are seeing increased demand from enterprises seeking cloud-based mobile app platforms to reduce up-front costs and time to market,” FeedHenry CEO Cathal McGloin said in a statement. “Corporate IT and app development teams will now be able to build applications for the most demanding consumer and enterprise users to quickly and easily deploy them securely to the cloud.”

FeedHenry, which was a finalist in GigaOM’s Mobilize Launchpad contest back in 2010, is based in Ireland, although it recently opened an office in England as its European business expands. Spain’s Telefonica is increasingly trying to push into the cloud, as are most large operators.

“The intersection of mobile and cloud is a natural one,” Telefonica Digital Cloud Director Tim Marsden said in the statement. “Our goal is to accelerate the availability of mobile-optimized, cloud-based services for app development and management, giving full access to cloud services like storage, security, caching, and server-side business logic.”

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The Hacker News itempointed readers to DNS lookup information posted early Monday that the popular project hosting and code sharing site was unavailable to users in Beijing, Shenzen and other Chinese localities.

Poor Chinese Developers, #GitHub is blocked in China! news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5090700—
Vianney Lecroart (@acemtp) January 21, 2013

Update: According to a newer post on the HN thread:

“I believe the blocking is directly related to an automated train ticket polling plugin that had brought down Github just days ago. Due to upcoming Chinese New Year, newly released train tickets are sold within minutes. That plugin introduces huge traffic to already crumbling ticket vending site, and it has obviously made railroad bureau angry. Blocking Github makes that plugin immediately malfunction because it makes reference to javascript files hosted on Github pages. The bureau has also paid a visit to the plugin’s author, for the purpose of intimidation perhaps.”

San Francisco-based Github is the most popular project hosting and code sharing site — last week it said it passed the 3-million user mark. It is not alone when it comes to companies that run afoul of Chinese censorship. YouTube, Facebook and news sites have been blocked, and last year Chinese users were unable to download a new version of Node.js because its version number was the same number as the date of the Tiananmen Square uprising.

As many on Twitter commented this morning and as GigaOM has reported before, these roadblocks not only hinder the flow of news and information for citizens, they hurt the ability of Chinese developers to compete — and in this case collaborate — on a global basis.

This story was updated at 07:55 a.m. PT with new information from the Hacker News post 

Feature photo courtesy of Flickr user matt512

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Phenomenal growth rate aside, Node.js “doesn’t have a ton of great monitoring tools, and as the ecosystem matures, enterprises need these kinds of tools to look at all the layers of software,” Glen Lougheed, CEO of the Vancouver, BC-based startup told me. “We’re trying to provide devops with the visibility they need to understand what’s happening with their applications — there’s really no great user-friendly tools for that.”

Admittedly, there are some good one-off tools that Node.js devotees have open-sourced. To get to a full APM system, though, developers would need to “Frankenstein a solution together and most people don’t want to do that,” Lougheed said. Businesses are in the market for a more polished and integrated monitoring suite, he said.

NodeFly just put its APM solution — built from the ground up for Node.js specifically — into open beta so developers can try it out. Other APM suites support multiple languages but may not offer the best full-on support for Node.js itself, NodeFly said. New Relic is working on a Node.js agent that could compete with NodeFly.

In other news, NodeFly this week netted $800,000 in seed money from some pretty choice backers including Issac Roth, the man behind the Makara Platform as a Service, which has morphed into Red Hat OpenShift. Roth also spent time at Wily Technology, a leading APM provider acquired by CA — so he knows the market.

Shasta Ventures led the funding round which also netted contributions from Irfhan Rajani of Appneta, Paul Rochester of Sun Microsystems and Layer 7, and Dimitri Sirota, also of Layer 7.

.

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That’s why it’s fun to come across a startup like Firefly, the creation of four University of Pennsylvania undergraduates who want to make it drop-dead easy for companies to guide customers through their websites by co-browsing or sharing screens without plugins or downloads.

So if you’re perusing your a healthcare provider’s web site and get stuck on a form, the customer service agent can with a button click,  get in and share that screen — without seeing any of the user’s other tabs or screens — to walk the user through the process. To facilitate this, the company just adds a few lines of JavaScript code to the URL header.

The product has gotten some ink  and it is cool. But what impressed me was the co-founders. I met two of the three – Wharton undergrads Patrick Leahy and Justin Meltzer  – at Boston AngelHack last spring, when Leahy was in in the midst of a hackathon road trip.

Just coming off the 48-hour Penn Apps hackathon, Leahy Bolt-bused up to Cambridge for the 30-hour Boston AngelHack, before jumping aboard StartupBus, a 70-hour hackathon-on-wheels to South By Southwest, where he was going to participate in — wait for it — another hackathon. Code means a lot to this guy…

Firefly co-founder Patrick Leahy

Foresaking Wall Street for code

So much, in fact, that Leahy turned down an investment banking internship with a New York financial services giant to focus on programming. “I did one internship on derivatives trading last year and liked it and was going to go back for investment banking, but I want to build the company,” Leahy told me by phone last week.

Leahy and another Firefly co-founder Dan Shipper are startup veterans, having already launched Airtime for Email, which gives companies a way to brand their marketing messages in email and track how those emails are treated. Were they read? Nuked? Forwarded? Never opened?

Leahy speaks about code as someone who is knowledgeable but still eager to learn. “We wrote the first version of Firefly at Penn Apps using Ruby on Rails but we couldn’t get to the level of complexity we needed so we rewrote it at AngelHack in Node.js. We learned that language at AngelHack and it’s perfect for what we needed,” Leahy said.

Picking the right tools

“Programming languages are like different sized kitchen knives — they suit different jobs,” he said. Ruby on Rails is a great framework for building “CRUD”  or Create, Read, Update, Delete — applications, he said. ”If you have a big table you want to edit — a customer information page, your sales rep page, Ruby on Rails if fine,” he said.

But for Firefly, which needs to handle fast browser-to-browser communication, Node.js was better. “We have to pass messages back and forth so our server sits in the middle and we wrote code to connect all those browsers. This is an evented pattern where you’re having a conversation, listening for things to be said and holding till you hear them. Ruby on Rails is not good for that but a functional programming language like JavaScript makes it easy to call a function to handle an event,” he added.

The Firefly foursome used to work out of dorms and apartments but is moving into the offices of First Round Capital, although there are no plans to take venture funding yet.

To be sure, Firefly isn’t entering an empty stage. LogMeIn offers a popular screen charing application and Salesforce.com bought GoInstant a screen-sharing company in July for $70 million. But Salesforce is attacking big companies with a full array of analytics and other perks while Firefly focuses on customer service and might be more attractive to smaller companies. Whatever the competitive landscape,  I wouldn’t sell this team short. They show a remarkable maturity that complements their youthful exuberance. Asked if Firefly was seeking venture capital, Leahy was cautious.

“We want to get to free cash flow and get stable before thinking about raising money from outside. We want to make sure we can manage our own money first,” Leahy said.

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Company CEO Lucas Carlson said the deal — terms of which were not disclosed — will give the company deeper and broader Node.js support and access to more Node.js developers.

“Nodester has one of the biggest communities Node programmers and Node.js was the fastest growing language on Appfog” he said in an interview. Node. js is a server-side, event-driven programming language popular among developers writing web applications.

For Portland, OR-based Appfog, it’s all about aggregating those developers — whether they code in PHP, Java, Node.js or what-have-you — and making it easier for them to run their applications on any cloud infrastructure.

Carlson says Appfog’s secret sauce is its ability to let you take a given application that’s running on Amazon and move it to HP’s cloud or vice versa with the click of a button. That is a company’s first line of defense against cloud lock-in, Carlson likes to say.  (Although clearly, you would have to lock in using Appfog’s PaaS to do that, but I quibble.)

In 2010, Appfog started out as PHP-focused PHP Fog but has since morphed into a “polyglot” PaaS that supports Ruby, Java, Node.js — about 12 frameworks in all. Next up? Java Enterprise Edition (J2EE), Go and Perl languages.

The problem with PaaS is that too many companies still see them as too expensive and as a possible source of vendor lock-in, Carlson said. His pitch is that developers can write and run their applications on Appfog for less than they would pay to run them on something like Amazon or Rackspace’s infrastructure alone.

As GigaOM reported in July, Appfog sets prices based on RAM alone and anything up to 2 GB of RAM is free. There are monthly plans for 4 GB, 16 GB and 32 GB for additional charges which include all the underlying infrastructure fees and for which Appfog bills the customer. That’s pretty good account control.  Then, if the company wants to move from one set of infrastructure to another it can do so, provided Appfog remains the intermediary.

Appfog, which itself builds atop Cloud Foundry APIs, competes with Heroku, Engine Yard and other PaaSes. This acquisition could be a sign of more PaaS consolidation to come.

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Datahero’s mission, Co-Founder and CEO Chris Neumann told me, is to let “literally any user … ask business questions and get information [by themselves].” It’s an important goal as we move toward a future where data will play an ever-more important role in decisions both business and personal. Not everyone can be an expert data analyst or data scientist, but everyone will need some sort of analytics tool at their disposal (GigaOM Pro subscription req’d).

Chris Neumann

In order to build a product product capable of fulfilling that mission, Neumann, an early engineer at Aster Data Systems, teamed with Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer Jeff Zabel, who came from BMW where he was in charge of designing user interfaces for third-party Internet-connected apps such as Pandora. The two think their mix of data and design expertise will make Datahero a big hit among users more familiar with consumer services such as Mint.com than with business intelligence applications.

I had a demo of the product, and it looks like Neumann and Zabel are onto something. Dragging and dropping a CSV file into the browser (or linking to an online data source) to get started is easy enough, as is the process of creating a workable dataset from it. Datahero tried its best to characterize proper categories and data types from the fields, but even when it messes up it’s easy to fix using a pulldown menu. Neumann said they learned from Mint.com that consumers don’t mind fixing errors, especially when an app is quite accurate to begin.

“We’re going to make it easy for the user to help us,” he said. Neumann’s big data background doesn’t hurt the process either. He said the product uses machine learning techniques to get smarter about characterizing data types with each new user.

Once the dataset is done, it’s just a matter of dragging and dropping values into the canvas area to create a chart. Datahero will generate the chart it thinks is best suited for your data. A collection of call records, for example, automatically generate a map showing the frequency with which particular area codes were dialed. The product even tells users what fields they should or shouldn’t add as they try to drill down deeper with their data, to avoid creating a messy or non-sensical graph.

Jeff Zabel

To me, the freemium Datahero functions a lot like Tableau Public, only easier for the layperson who understands very little about X and Y axes, proper data formatting and analytic functions. For users who don’t even want to lift a finger to drag and drop fields, for example, Datahero offers predetermined graph types based on the type of data a user has and what other users have made from that type of data in the past. Although there are capabilities for users with more analytics knowledge, Zabel said the goal is to “make the average user a hero” and only “advance the advanced user.”

However, if this all sounds just a little simplistic given Neumann’s background and massive unstructured datasets and MapReduce at Aster Data, it’s only temporary. Although he and Zabel are keeping mum on the exact plans, Datahero will likely start to look something like Google Apps with regard to specific features for basic, advanced and enterprise users, and complex analytics (while still maintaining the consumer user experience) are coming. The company’s investors wouldn’t have been so excited, Neumann said, “if this was just another graphing layer for Excel.”

Bonus material for the developers out there: Datahero’s application layer is written entirely in Node.js and is hosted on the Joyent Cloud. You can learn a lot more about Node.js at our Structure conference in a few weeks, where we will be speaking with Joyent’s Jason Hoffman on the topic.

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Byron Sebastian

In November 2010, Heroku was king of the platform-as-a-service startups, hosting 100,000 applications all written in Ruby. Today, Heroku is still arguably the PaaS king, but it’s operating on a slightly larger stage. It’s now part of the Salesforce.com family and, according to former Heroku CEO and current Salesforce.com VP of Platforms Byron Sebastian, is hosting more than 1.5 million applications — an increase of approximately 15x in less than 18 months.

By way of comparison, most startup PaaS providers can only claim in the tens of thousands of applications. Force.com, the other PaaS offering within Salesforce.com, claims more than 200,000 applications, and I’ve similar estimates for Google App Engine (although that was before a pricing change that angered many developers).

Java and Python and Node.js, oh my!

And while it’s still a Ruby shop at heart and plays host a majority Ruby app population, Heroku can attribute some of its rapid growth to its new polyglot status. “Polyglot” means to be able to speak several different languages, making its adoption as an adjective for describing PaaS offerings particularly apt. On its new Celadon Cedar runtime environment, which Heroku released last year and which supports a handful of popular programming languages and frameworks, “at least 50 percent of the apps are in languages that are not Ruby,” Sebastian told me during a recent phone call. Java, Python and Node.js, in particular, are really catching on, he said.

Cloud Foundry at launch; it now supports PHP, Python and more.

From a business perspective, being polyglot is almost a no-brainer in the PaaS space: you can’t attract Java, Python and Node.js developers, for example, if your platform doesn’t support them. Many PaaS offerings began as single-language efforts — Ruby (Heroku, Engine Yard), PHP (PHP Fog), .NET (Windows Azure, arguably), Python (App Engine) — but have since expanded their scopes. When VMware launched its Cloud Foundry project and service last April, and when startup DotCloud launched a month earlier, they were polyglot from day one.

I suspect anyone not polyglot now (you know who you are) will make the move in time if their engineering budgets allow for it. In the end, it’s the platform experience, not programming language, that make the PaaS.

When apps change, platforms change

But Heroku also has one other, somewhat related, secret to its success — its Salesforce.com connection. “Twelve to eighteen months ago, all our traction was with individual developers,” Sebastian said (it added 34,000 in 24 hours after unveiling a Facebook partnership in September). Now, however, enterprise developers using Force.com look at Heroku for new types of applications not well-suited for that platform. Java support, as well as a general trust in the Salesforce.com brand, helps make that decision easier.

Really, though, it’s the promise that PaaS will provide a higher quality of life for next-generation applications that should float all boats in the space. Sebastian said companies are building customer-facing apps to drive consumer loyalty, or provide more services online, or to improve their distribution networks by training retail partners on products. They want lightweight, dynamic platforms to go along with lightweight, dynamic applications.

This is something we’ll be discussing at our Structure event in June in a panel that includes AppFog’s Lucas Carlson, DotCloud’s Solomon Hykes, and Derek Collison, the man behind Cloud Foundry and new co-founder and CEO of Apcera. Sebastian told me “it’s Heroku versus the status quo” for developers, but it’s really PaaS versus the status quo. As application development continues to evolve thanks to dynamic languages and mobile-first strategies, it looks more and more like PaaS could win.

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Node.js, a server-side JavaScript framework, has ridden a wave of popularity as evidenced by new support by Windows Azure. Developers like using the framework to write server applications because they can keep using standard libraries and their JavaScript skill set to build very efficient server applications. The question here is, does a change at the top of the project spark concern about that momentum, or is it just a natural evolution?

Judging from responses to Dahl’s post, the Node.js faithful are sorry to see him step back, but understand his need to do so. Some posted some last-minute requests for the framework, just in case.

According to Dahl’s post, he’s not really going anywhere, but after three years on this project it’s time for a change:

I am still an employee at Joyent and will advise from the sidelines but I won’t be involved in the day-to-day bug fixes. Isaac has final say over what makes it into the releases. Appeals for new features, changes, and bug fixes should now be directed at him.

“Genuinely surprised at the “Ryan Dahl stepping down as Node.js leader” news. Node has only just hit the big time really. Good luck to him!”

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Was Bill Gates, chairman and co-founder of Microsoft and the power behind the proprietary Windows-and-Office juggernaut, really an open source champion? A new Wired article lays Microsoft’s wider embrace of open source technologies — most recently Node.js support in Windows Azure  and the decision to back Hadoop at the expense of an internal Dryad project, squarely at Gates’ feet.

The story recounts a meeting in the summer of 2008 where some (unnamed) top Microsoft execs argued against opening up more to open source while Ray Ozzie, the chief software architect, and Sam Ramji, the open source strategist, argued the opposite. According to Wired:

Then Bill Gates stood up.

He walked to the whiteboard and drew a diagram of how the system could work, from copyrights to code contribution to patents, and he said — in no uncertain terms — that the company had to make the move.

That was it: Microsoft had to be more open to open source. The story quotes a number of former and current Microsoft employees who might be trying to curry favor with their former or current boss, but the account rings true. Here’s why.

1: Microsoft is nothing if not pragmatic

The company will fight, fight, fight for its own agenda, but if it senses futility, it will declare victory and reverse course. I have heard Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer counsel a company that was engaged in a fruitless tussle with another company to do exactly that: “Declare victory and move on.”  And that’s why I wouldn’t be surprised to see Word and PowerPoint on the iPad or iPhone — not too long after Ballmer mockingly stomped on an iPhone at the company sales meeting. If Microsoft believes that the X86-based PC is on the losing side of history, it will do what it can to keep its money-making Office — if not Windows — on every device on the planet. The decision to support ARM architectures in the upcoming Windows 8 is just the beginning of that journey.

And that is why a company with a CEO who once likened Linux to cancer can now with a straight face bring Node.js, Hadoop, even Linux itself into the fold. There are now reports that Microsoft is recruiting Linux experts whose mission it will be “to identify, define, scope, implement and drive to completion software projects that promote full, transparent interoperability between Windows and Linux in Microsoft virtual and cloud environments.”

2: Once it gets the memo — often late — Microsoft goes all out

Microsoft is often late to the party, but once it gets there, look out! It was late to spreadsheets (after Lotus); it was late to word processing (after WordPerfect); it was late to PC databases (after dBase, Foxpro, Paradox.) It was famously late to the Internet — but once Gates decided to turn the ship around — as Netscape Navigator posed a huge threat — that ship was turned around. Gates’ 1995 memo on the Internet tidal wave is one example of this. Anyone remember Navigator now? Or even Netscape? Years later, Gates even had the good grace in one speech to claim to have “discovered the Internet”  (wait for it) after everyone else did.

It’s tempting now, with iPhones and Android phones tearing up the market, and more businesses flocking to Apple hardware,  to write Microsoft off. Word to the wise: don’t be hasty.

3:  Microsoft works best when it’s under the gun

And the corollary is that Microsoft works worst when it’s dominant. Ask most shops why they upgrade Office (or Windows) and it’s typically because they want to stay legal — not because they’re dying for new features. It’s hard to remember in this age of Google Chrome and Firefox and Opera, that Internet Explorer was once the upstart browser. It left Netscape Navigator in the dust because Microsoft had to make it better than Navigator or no one would use it. On the other hand, many people feel that Microsoft Office, the undisputed leader in productivity software suites, remains fat and feature bloated. In short: Office could still use a good competitor. (Pre-emptive apologies to the Open Office, Google Apps fans out there.)

The Microsoft SQL Server team remains scrappy and innovative. Why? Because they have a dominant competitor (still) in Oracle. As Cade Metz, the reporter who wrote this article says: Microsoft is “a company that’s at its best when it’s freaking out.”

To be clear, Microsoft had an open source strategy before this 2008 meeting. For example,  it had already worked with Samba, an open source effort to foster interoperability between Windows clients and Linux servers — although cynics said much of that peaceful coexistence came about because of legal anti-trust action.

But the Wired account holds that it was Gates’ statement at that meeting that blew away any lingering obstructionism in the ranks and forced Microsoft to get off its duff when it comes to open source. Given the boundless regard that Microsoft employees hold for Gates, only he could get the famously fractious product groups to get on board with open source.

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