The developers behind Node.js released version 4.0 last week. The new version is a major update that includes significant improvements and many new language features. It is the first release to incorporate improvements from io.js, a community-driven fork that recently reintegrated with upstream Node.js.

The io.js project emerged earlier this year when prominent Node.js contributors decided to go their own way, seeking more open governance and a more predictable release cycle. They recently resolved their differences with Joyent, the corporate steward of the Node.js project. Following the reconciliation, the upstream maintainers adopted the io.js code base.

Node.js 4.0 includes the latest and greatest version of the V8 JavaScript runtime, which opens the door for developers to use a number of new language features from the ECMAScript 6 (ES6) specification. In previous versions of Node, important ES6 features were only available while using experimental command line flags. Some of our favorite new features supported out of the box in Node.js 4.x include arrow functions, generators, for/of loops, and template strings.

Not only are the mountains of Utah great, and the people the friendliest, Provo has some things going for it when it comes to technology.

Last week I got back to RethinkDB HQ in Mountain View from attending StartFEST 2015 hosted by BeehiveStartups over in Provo, UT. RethinkDB was kindly offered an opportunity to do a small workshop in the developer track of the festival, and being always eager to get out in the world, I packed my bags for Utah.

Our friends at Compose announced today that they are taking the beta label off of their RethinkDB hosting, offering it as an officially-supported service that is ready for adoption in production environments. They also updated the service to use RethinkDB 2.1, which introduces support for automatic failover.

Getting started on your first hardware project can be difficult. Luckily these days we have things like the Raspberry Pi. which put almost everything we need into a nice bundled package to get started on your first cool hardware project. Even better, the Raspberry Pi runs Rasbian, a variant of Debian, which makes it pretty familiar with those already comfortable with popular Linux distributions. The next step is to connect a sensor and it’s definitely easier than you think. But the question always remains, once I’m collecting my data, where will I store it and how do I easily setup some sort of notification service? In this post, I’ll tell you what you need to do to connect your first sensor, get RethinkDB going on your Raspberry Pi, and push that data to all your devices using PushBullet.

Today we’re proud to announce RethinkDB 2.1 (Forbidden Planet). Download it now!

With over 200 enhancements and a major restructuring of the clustering layer to support high availability, this release is the culmination of over a year of development and many months of testing. The major features in RethinkDB 2.1 include:

• Automatic failover – if a server fails or the cluster experiences a split-brain scenario, RethinkDB will automatically elect new servers and continue to operate without human intervention.
• Always on – you can add and remove nodes from a live cluster without experiencing downtime.
• Asynchronous APIs – asynchronous queries are now supported via EventMachine in Ruby and Twisted, Tornado, and asyncio frameworks in Python.
• SSL access – official drivers now come with SSL support to make it easier to access RethinkDB clusters over the public internet.
• More math commands – ReQL now supports more math operators including floor, ceil, and round.