Amazon Web Services Adds Node.js SDK to Developers’ Options
Amazon Web Services this week released an SDK for Node.js, providing developers with a JavaScript library to build applications for AWS services.
Improving on the preview release made available in December, this general release has added bound parameters, proxies, streams, IAM roles for EC2 instances, and version locking. The locking feature lets users commit to a specific API version, which Amazon says will protect companies’ production code from changes due to SDK updates.
Applications built with the SDK can be run on Amazon’s cloud services, including Amazon’s Relational Database Service, as well as the Virtual Private Cloud, which lets users provision a logically isolated section of the cloud to use as a customizable virtual networking environment however they wish.
The free SDK can be installed using the npm package manager for Node.js or it can be downloaded from AWS’ website, which includes examples of parameters and streams as well as a guide to getting started. The SDK library gives JavaScript objects for Amazon S3, Amazon EC2, DynamoDB, and Amazon SWF, helping to facilitate coding.
Developers enjoy Node.js, a server-side, event-driven software platform based on Google Chrome's V8 JavaScript, because it can create an entire web application in JavaScript without the need for external software. It’s designed to minimize overhead and maximum scalability, so applications can be scaled quickly without having to deal with polling, timeouts, threads, and event loops.
The platform has been gaining momentum and popularity among programmers. Amazon CTO Werner Vogels said in a blog post that AWS developers he’s talked to use Node.js for its ability to handle a large number of concurrent connections with low latencies. The addition of the Node.js SDK to the network gives developers another choice when creating for Amazon’s cloud.
For some time now Amazon has offered platform-as-a-service Elastic Beanstalk for AWS, which makes it easier to develop and deploy applications in its cloud. Elastic Beanstalk also supports Node.js, as well as applications based on Python, Ruby, PHP, Java, and .NET.
Amazon is hardly the first web services company to support Node.js. Among other cloud providers are Windows Azure, Engine Yard, and Node.js corporate steward Joyent.
