Starting today, we’re sponsoring $500 for the best content written about RethinkDB during Pluralsight’s hack.guides() 2016 Tutorial Contest.

If you’re not familiar with hack.guides(), it’s a developer community for writing technical guides. It’s a great way to collaborate with other writers and help spread your knowledge across a growing open-source community!

Today we are pleased to announce the first official release of Horizon, an open-source backend that lets developers build and scale realtime web applications. Horizon includes:

• A backend server built with Node.js and RethinkDB that supports data persistence, realtime streams, input validation, user authentication, and permissions
• A JavaScript client library that developers can use on the frontend to store JSON documents in the database, perform queries, and subscribe to live updates
• A command-line tool that can generate project templates, start up a local Horizon development server, and help you deploy your Horizon application to the cloud

The Horizon server is a complete backend that developers can use to power their applications. It’s great for rapid prototyping: simply run the Horizon server from the command-line and develop your frontend user experience with the Horizon client library. Frontend developers can use Horizon to create full applications without writing any backend code.

Horizon is open-source software, which means that you can use and modify it as you see fit. Run a local instance on your laptop during development and then deploy your application anywhere you want: low-cost VPS hosting environments, scalable public cloud platforms, or your own bare metal. Horizon takes advantage of RethinkDB’s battle-tested clustering, which makes it easy to scale as your audience grows.

We’re back at ng-conf in Salt Lake City for the second year in a row! If you’re in town and want to know where to find us, here’s a quick breakdown of our itinerary over the next few days. You can also find us at our booth just outside the entrance to the Grand Ballroom.

Wednesday May 4th

• 12:30pm: JavaScript Jabber Podcast live recording in the Grand Ballroom (listen here!)

Thursday May 5th - Fair Day

• 10:00am - 10:30am: Ask Me Anything with co-founder Mike Glukhovsky at Hernitage
• 12:45pm - 1:00pm Newsroom interview livestream with Mike G. at Venizia
• 3:00pm - 4:00pm Horizon workshop Come build a chat app using Horizon and Angular in the Grand Ballroom A/D
• 5:00pm - 6:00pm Experts Room Let’s talk databases with Mike G. in the Audubon

Friday May 6th

• Come check out our booth if you haven’t already!

We look forward to meeting everyone and sharing Horizon with the Angular community. If you’re having trouble finding us, tweet @rethinkdb and @horizonjs.

Whenever we hear about another organization using RethinkDB, we always get incredibly excited. So when we first heard that NASA was using RethinkDB, we were over the moon. We asked Collin Estes, Director of Software Engineering, how they use RethinkDB at NASA and we are proud to present this case study of their usage of RethinkDB below:

Today we’re pleased to announce the release of RethinkDB 2.3 (Fantasia). Download it now!

RethinkDB 2.3 has new security features that bring more flexibility to database deployment and administration. The update also includes performance improvements, a handful of new ReQL features, and a beta release of our recently-introduced Windows port. Here are some of the highlights:

• Network encryption: built-in TLS support encrypts database connections
• Users and permissions: you can achieve granular control over database access by creating user accounts and assigning permissions
• The fold command: we added a new fold command to the ReQL query language that lets you perform reduce-like operations on ordered streams, with optional support for emitting a stream of values based on the current accumulator state.
• Windows compatibility: support for running RethinkDB on Windows is now in beta. You can download and install RethinkDB 2.3 on Microsoft’s operating system.