En·gi·neer·ing n.
How we build awesomeness at Jolicloud

I was delighted to be invited to speak at Node Dublin last week, the first Node.js conference in Europe. Congratulations again to Cian and all his team for putting together such an amazing event. It was a tremendous opportunity for the Node community to get together and share our experiences.

We started building with Node at Jolicloud back in early 2011 and it has since become the cornerstone of our platform. So it was a great pleasure for me to be able to share how we’ve been connecting the dots and reinventing the operating system entirely using JavaScript, from the hardware to the cloud. The video of the talk will be online very soon, but in the meantime you can see my slides below:

During the talk I also announced the Jolicloud Open Platform and we launched developers.jolicloud.com. Over the coming weeks, we will progressively open source our own Node modules, including for instance the SoundCloud integration presented on stage or the Readability and Instapaper modules we just pushed live yesterday. We’re just getting started, but our plan is to provide examples and docs so developers can easily create their own Node modules for their favorite cloud services.

Keep an eye on this blog for more info — it’s coming soon!

Photo by Karolina

Slug generators are a common thing of the web but it’s like finding a script to remove accents, everyone has his own solution and it never fits your need! The same applied to me while working on the new Jolicloud. That’s why I created uslug (as in unicode slug).

We need to produce slug for obvious reasons, one is clarity in the navigation of our app. I first tried looking for some lib/script that could already do the job. But all I could find were scripts that would keep only [a-zA-Z0-9_-] characters.

It’s 2012! I want Chinese people to be able to slug just like English or French people! Punycode is largely supported in browser so it’s fine to provide this kind of functionality.

So here’s uslug.js, just give it your string and it will slug the hell of it! Here’s some example:

  uslug('Быстрее и лучше!') // 'быстрее-и-лучше'
  uslug('汉语/漢語') // '汉语漢語'

Installation is as easy as npm install uslug. I open-sourced the whole thing on github, feel free to report issues and all!

One last thing, I would like to thanks Dave Dash for the kick start and unorm for the JavaScript Unicode Normalization lib.

This post was cross-posted on my personal blog.

Last Wednesday, we hosted a Node Meetup at our office here in Paris. We had a great turnout! Over 80 people came out to hear some very interesting talks about Node.js and meet the community of JavaScript and Node enthusiasts. We had a lot of fun chatting with everyone over pizza and beers.

We were delighted to welcome Ryan Dahl, creator of Node.js, who wowed everyone by implementing an HTTP web server in C using libuv, the new networking layer for Node, right in front of our eyes. The goal of this project is to make Node work both on Unix and Windows systems by abstracting the particularities of both platforms. You can download the source code from Ryan’s demo server.

Ryan Dahl from Joyent

In addition, Sylvain Zimmer, co-founder of Joshfire, gave a presentation about sharing views between the client and the server, and Jie Meng-Gérard, co-founder of Whyd, spoke about the use of JSON on the server and shared his thoughts on performances.

Overall this event was a big success, and we hope to host many more similar events in the future! Merci to Ryan, Sylvain, Jie, Joyent, and everyone who attended this meetup; without you this event would not have been this cool. :)

Check out some photos from the evening below:

Romain Huet & Jeremy Selier are back to work hacking on Node and improving their Vim skills!

Welcome to Jolicloud’s developer blog!

Over the past two years, we’ve been pushing the boundaries of HTML5 and the Open Web to create the first cloud-based operating system. We are really excited that Jolicloud is now evolving into a powerful cloud management platform, and we want to use this space to talk about our latest innovations, developments, and the lessons we learn as we continue to grow.

First up, stay tuned for a recap of the Paris Node Meetup we’re hosting at our office tonight. Ryan Dahl, creator of Node.js, will be speaking. We’re looking forward to hearing him talk and hanging out with other Node enthusiasts over beers. :)

À bientôt !

Romain Huet, Co-Founder & CTO of Jolicloud, is launching the blog and preparing pizza for tonight’s meetup!