Join us tomorrow (Friday, January 30th) for a live webcast at 1:30PM PT. Daniel Mewes, RethinkDB’s director of engineering, and systems engineer Tim Maxwell will introduce some of the new features included in our upcoming 1.16 release.

The webcast will offer a first look at RethinkDB’s new comprehensive cluster management API, which makes it easy to configure sharding and replication with ReQL expressions. You’ll also get a hands-on introduction to RethinkDB’s realtime push functionality, demonstrating how RethinkDB can dramatically simplify the development of realtime web apps. The webcast will conclude with a live Q&A segment, where you’ll have a chance to query the RethinkDB team in realtime.

Over the past few months the team at RethinkDB has been working on a project to make building modern, realtime apps dramatically easier. The upcoming features are the start of an exciting new database access model – instead of polling the database for changes, the developer can tell RethinkDB to continuously push updated query results to applications in realtime.

This work started as an innocuous feature to help developers integrate RethinkDB with other realtime systems. A few releases ago we shipped changefeeds – a way to subscribe to change notifications in the database. Whenever a document changes in a table, the server pushes a notification describing the change to subscribed clients. You can subscribe to changes on a table like this:

r.table('accounts').changes().run(conn)

Originally we intended this feature to help developers push data from RethinkDB to specialized data stores like ElasticSearch and message systems like RabbitMQ, but the release generated enormous excitement we didn’t expect. Digging deeper, we saw that many web developers used changefeeds as a solution to a much broader problem – how do you adapt the database to push realtime data to applications?

Rick Otten (@rotten) recently released a foreign data wrapper for PostgreSQL that provides a bridge to RethinkDB. The wrapper makes it possible to expose individual tables from a RethinkDB database in PostgreSQL, enabling users to access their RethinkDB data with with SQL queries.

The wrapper could prove especially useful in cases where a developer wants to incorporate RethinkDB into an existing application built on PostgreSQL, taking advantage of RethinkDB features like changefeeds to easily add realtime updates. You could, for example, use RethinkDB to store and propagate realtime events while continuing to use PostgreSQL for things like account management and other data persistence.

A group of prominent Node.js contributors recently launched a community-driven fork called io.js. One of the most promising advantages of the new fork is that it incorporates a much more recent version of the V8 JavaScript runtime. It happens to support a range of useful ECMAScript 6 (ES6) features right out of the box.

Although io.js is still too new for production deployment, I couldn’t resist taking it for a test drive. I used io.js and the experimental rethinkdbdash driver to get an early glimpse at the future of ES6-enabled RethinkDB application development.

This week, Andrei Horak released Remodel, a new Python-based object document mapping (ODM) library for RethinkDB. Remodel simplifies RethinkDB application development by automating much of the underlying logic that comes into play when working with relations.

Remodel users create high-level model objects and rely on a set of simple class attributes to define relationships. The framework then uses the model objects to generate tables and indexes. It abstracts away the need to do manual work like performing join queries or populating relation attributes when inserting new items. Remodel also has built-in support for connection pooling, which obviates the need to create and manage connections. In this brief tutorial, I’ll give you a hands-on look at Remodel and show you how to use it in a web application.