What is the purpose and what does it mean for the community?
The merger agenda includes such goals as enhanced operational excellence, streamlined member engagement, increased collaboration across the JavaScript ecosystem and affiliated standards bodies, and an “umbrella” project structure to tighten the collaboration across all JavaScript projects.
So far, JS environment seemed to fall behind Node.js and the merger could flatten the inequalities for the sake of better efficiency. Although laconic and brief, the news caused enthusiastic feedback among JS users, who so far needed various tools in order to benefit from numerous novelties – the integration should bring an end to such inconveniences, resulting in more compelling work. To some extent, this junction might serve a highly demanded role of the Ockham Blade, reducing redundant tools to a necessary minimum and, consequently, increasing productivity.
The announced plans may lead to extensive benefits for the community, which could in the future translate into measurable gains for companies developing in JS, leading to better efficiency of conducted projects. Node.js is known for its remarkable ability to handle a great scale of projects, as it is used by such giants as Uber, Netflix, Twitter, and 9gag. A recent addition to Node.js enabled multithreading, which is also beneficial for the technology development. Current plans could significantly increase Node’s popularity, which may mean the right time to expand existing projects into bigger endeavors. As far as we can tell now, the community and the market will gladly welcome the discussed merge, as it could speed up the development, enable new features, and give a broader, more efficient support.
We need to keep in mind that, as for now, the statement is on an intent to merge, not announcing the actual merge. The board of directors is yet to make decisions on further steps, including formal decisions on the fusion, the possible organizational structure, and technical framework. Since we’re all anticipating further details, we’re looking forward to the outcome of the Q&A session during Node+JS Interactive, which will be held on the 10-12th of October in Vancouver. Hopefully, the outcome will be beneficial for the whole JavaScript community and bring a new quality to JS development.