NearForm at OpenJS World 2021

Scheduled for June 2, OpenJS World is a global virtual conference where JavaScript professionals connect with community members to discuss and learn about projects such as AMP, Dojo, Electron and Node.js. Developers, software engineers, developer advocates and business leaders network, collaborate and get insights from experts — many of whom come from NearForm.

This year’s event features a keynote from NearForm founder and president Cian Ó Maidín, two talks on Fastify from Matteo Collina, talks by James Snell and David Gonzalez and a panel discussion including Dominykas Blyžė.

Here is a flavour of what to expect:

In 2020, NearForm built what was to become the most widely adopted COVID-19 Exposure Notification app in the world. In just five months, the team successfully deployed and scaled their digital contact tracing solution for nine governments.

In this keynote, Cian will talk about the challenges NearForm faced building an app for all and the need to get it right from the start, despite working to tight deadlines during a pandemic that kept evolving. He will discuss how NearForm used an open source approach to public health to help break chains of transmission and save lives using JavaScript.

Fastify is a web framework for Node.js that enjoys impressive satisfaction levels among developers, with an 89% rating in the last state of javascript. It combines an excellent developer experience with top-class performance, with minimal reduction on top of Node.js core.

In this talk, Matteo will take the audience through the fundamentals of Fastify and present a live coded example of Fastify in action.

The Node.js HTTP client is a fundamental element of any application, yet many think it cannot be improved. Matteo set out to prove them wrong: In this talk he will present undici , a new HTTP client for Node.js that doubles the throughput of your application.

The story behind this improvement begins with the birth of TCP/IP and is rooted in one of the fundamental limitations of networking: head-of-line blocking (HOL blocking). HOL blocking is one of those topics that developers blissfully ignore, yet it profoundly affects the runtime experience of the distributed applications they build every day. Undici is a HTTP/1.1 client that avoids HOL blocking by using keep-alive and pipelining, resulting in a doubling of your application throughput.

Although there is much validity to the argument that Node.js is not a web browser and therefore shouldn't act like one, it is still beneficial to ensure that JavaScript that works in the browser works the same way on the server.

Considerable effort has gone into aligning Node.js with the web platform recently, including implementation of the WHATWG URL API, TextEncoder, Intl and more. Node.js 15 has moved even closer, with the addition of EventTarget, AbortController, and the Web Crypto API.

James’s talk will introduce developers to the new web platform superpowers that are now built into Node.js and present insights on ongoing efforts for what may be coming in the near future.

At NearForm, we built a number of COVID-19 tracking applications but — more important — we also open sourced the core. This source can be found at COVID Green .

In this talk, David discusses the major challenges NearForm encountered along the way and reveals how to operate a planetary scale application with a small team of people and a surprisingly low number of outages. He will outline why the company chose a serverless approach, the key problems we dealt with and his recommendations for running large-scale geographically dispersed apps.

Senior developer Dominykas is a passionate advocate of Node.js and a member of several teams within the community. He is participating in a panel discussion on the work of the Node.js Package Maintenance Working Group. Established in 2018, the group includes users, authors, and maintainers who work toward solutions to ensure that key Node.js ecosystem modules are maintained, safe and up to date.

This talk will showcase the working group’s current focuses, guidance and tooling three years since it was set up.

The OpenJS Foundation ’s mission is to encourage wider adoption and continued development of key JavaScript solutions and related technologies. It does this by providing “a centre of gravity” for the open source JavaScript ecosystem. The portfolio of open source technologies that developers depend on to create, test and deploy critical applications is growing all the time. The main objectives of the OpenJS Foundation are:

The foundation’s central belief is that there must be a neutral home for critical projects, with shared principles of technical governance and accountability. By providing this, it is helping to secure the long-term sustainability of both individual projects and the entire ecosystem.

OpenJS World 2021 happens virtually on June 2. Make sure you register to attend !