You’ll learn fundamentals and more advanced topics from node aficionados at Cloud9 and Microsoft. We’ll use Cloud9 IDE to develop your apps and show how to deploy your apps to Windows Azure.

Matt Pardee will be speaking about using Socket.io in your Node applications.  You’ll also see Ruben Daniels at the event. So come and say hi!

There is a three-hour training that is followed by a competition. You will use your freshly acquired knowledge straight away! The jury will base its opinion on innovation, completeness and quality. First prize is the newest XBox, the second and third place winners get a Windows Phone!

This is what the program looks like:

9:00am – Doors open

9:30am – Hands-on training begins

12:30pm – Training ends; Lunch

1:00pm – Node bake-off begins (create your own project from scratch)

5:00pm – Node bake-off ends; Judging of projects begins

6:00pm -  Judging is finished – prizes and other magical things

Microsoft will make sure you are getting breakfast, lunch, and snacks.

There is a capacity of 75 and we expect this event to fill up fast so RSVP quick!

See you there!

We have built a solid product. Nevertheless, we have barely scratched the surface of what’s possible. Beside our work on stabilizing the IDE, we have also been working on some very big and exciting new features. Features that will enable you to access, edit, debug and run your applications in new ways. Features that will change the way you collaborate on projects. Features that enable you to work on your code wherever you are.

However, we are not ready to release these features to the general public just yet. Some of you already shared the interest of helping us improve the product in the past. Your feedback has been a driving force in the development of Cloud9 IDE. To streamline this process, we are setting up a beta test program. Participants of this beta program get:

• An early look at upcoming features and improvements
• The ability to influence how new features turn out by giving feedback

If you would like to participate in our beta program, please fill out our sign-up form.

Get your hands on the future of Cloud9 IDE: join our beta program!

Our new architecture has three main characters: Mr. Proxy, PAPA and a bunch of MAMAs. In this new relationship, PAPA takes care of the money (billing) and administration (various databases). However, PAPA is not exactly monogamous, he has many MAMAs, each taking care of a bunch of children playing in the sandbox. Mr. Proxy is the gatekeeper to our world. He’s that guy at the bank that tells each customer what desk to go to so that the workload is spread appropriately across bank workers (in our case MAMAs). Mr. Proxy is very customer oriented, if he notices that one of the MAMAs falls asleep, within seconds he stops sending customers there. And then shoots the MAMA in the head, relocating the children. Yes, our analogy turns dark somewhere.

Alright, let’s show how this works more concretely in a picture:

Mr. Proxy keeps a list of all MAMAs that he knows for sure are alive and kicking and ready to help out users. MAMA servers serve the IDE for a set of projects and Dashboard for a set of users, and handles all related requests. Mr. Proxy keeps track of which IDE project is served by which MAMA server. When Mr. Proxy receives a request, he ensures that the user sending the request is authenticated by checking it with PAPA. Subsequently, he looks up what project the request belongs to and what MAMA hosts that project. If a previous request for this project has been handled by a certain MAMA, he will forward the request to that MAMA again. If the MAMA is no longer alive (tragically, that happens), he will choose a new MAMA and send the request there.

MAMAs come and go and we can dynamically increase the number of MAMAs as our user base and load grows. When a MAMA comes to life she notifies Mr. Proxy of her presence. From then on she will start receiving requests for IDE projects. Such requests fall into roughly four categories:

• File system related requests: list the contents of a directory, load a file, save a file
• Run/Debug: Run a node.js program, do step debugging for a node.js program
• Console commands: run a “git” command, run an “ls” command
• Deploy: deploy a node.js program to Azure, Cloud Foundry, Heroku or Joyent

Running, debugging and console commands launch MAMA child processes. These child processes are sandboxed to not disturb other users’ processes too much. MAMA is in charge of keeping the sandbox clean and tidy.

No-Downtime Upgrades

Our node.js processes running in production are managed using run.js, a simple node.js process manager we built that really warrants a blog post of its own. Its main task is to make sure a node process keeps running, and if it somehow crashes to start it again immediately. Run.js is not dependent on external modules and only ~1k lines.

One of the cooler features that run.js has is version switching. When we want to release a new version of our software, we update it in the repository and make sure it’s checked out on all the MAMA servers. Then, we initiate the “run.js switch” command. What that will do is start a new MAMA server with the newly released code, and once started up, send a SIGHUP signal to the old MAMA server, which signals her to perform a graceful shutdown. When MAMA receives such a signal she will unregister herself with Mr. Proxy so that no new projects are assigned to her. Then she will check the state of running processes in the sandbox. If none are running, she will shut down, otherwise she will patiently keep running until all those processes have finished executing — although she won’t wait forever, of course. This allows us to upgrade our backend without downtime. As a user, you may notice the “Offline” indicator in the IDE to blink for a second, indicating that you have likely been moved to a MAMA server running the latest and greatest software.

The Next Step

As you are likely aware, our backend system is 100% node.js. We’re running one of the more complex and large node.js code bases in production. For features in upcoming releases we need a way to easily take Cloud9 apart and rebuild it in a different configuration. For instance, right now we have an open source version of Cloud9, and an extended cloud version we run on c9.io with a different set of configuration options and plugins.

Our composability sofar depends a lot on git submodules. Our c9.io codebase has the open source cloud9 as a git submodule and extends it in various ways. The open source cloud9 in turn has ACE, our code editor as a git submodule. While this has worked for us thus far, we’re currently working on a big refactor to make Cloud9 IDE more flat modular. Therefore, a few of our great people (Tim Caswell, Fabian Jacobs and Christoph Dorn) have developed a simple, yet powerful node.js plugin system named Architect that we will use to more naturally create alternative versions of our product for different use cases. With that, we’re also getting rid of git submodules, instead using node.js’ native package manager npm, and finally migrating over to node 0.6.

All these efforts are designed to make Cloud9 IDE more stable, more powerful and more hackable for you. We can’t wait to get some of the more visible, user-facing innovations in your hands, and a solid foundation is fundamental to make that happen.

Cloud Foundry deployments are not only super fast (~15 seconds!), but Cloud Foundry is also in the unique position as the leading open-source PaaS, enabling developers to install it on their own server. Cloud9 in turn allows users to specify the URL of the server they want to deploy to. Read on for details…

This opens up incredible opportunities for developers to deploy their applications to a range of staging and production servers. By default, the endpoint is set to CloudFoundry.com’s hosted service, which you can sign up for here.

This integration was worked on by Cloud9 developers Mostafa Eweda and Jan Jongboom and announced during Cloud Foundry’s one-year anniversary event. We feel privileged to have been invited to this exclusive event and look forward to what Cloud Foundry has in store for the future. Happy one-year anniversary, guys!

Happy Coding!

Most importantly, as Zef mentioned earlier, we’ve rolled out a massive update to our console system. This system is responsible for many operations, including running and debugging code, pushing and pulling between repositories, and issuing console commands (ls, cd, e.t.c.). Its new stability means a better, more reliable workflow for you. We hope you enjoy it!

On top of that, we’ve made some changes to searching across files: you can now perform a replace across your files, too!

Read on for details and the full changelog:

The search field supports multiple lines; even though just two are shown, you can continue to hit Shift-Enter for another line. The file extensions can be a comma-separated list of file types. The search results pane in the console has also had a cosmetic upgrade to better inform you on the details of your search. Finally, you’re also no longer limited to just 50 search results.

Bug Fixes

• “Next Tab” and “Previous Tab” shortcuts for Mac have been fixed
• Fixes for “go to file” option
• Fixes for “save” and “save as”
• Fixes for the console losing focus when typing
• Fixes for the status bar and minimap
• Tab closing (including from the command line) are operational again

Here’s what happened in the meantime:

Bug Fixes

• “Save this file” dialog fix for Firefox
• Fix for dragging and dropping files into the tree
• Fixes for the image viewer
• Improvements for exiting full screen viewers

Therefore, over the past weeks, we have rewritten the console system and are very close to rolling it out to everybody. The new console system will drastically improve the availability and responsiveness of the console and dependent functionality such as source control, running and debugging.

We truly believe in developing in the Cloud and make it our responsibility to make it awesome for all. Thanks for believing in Cloud9 IDE and your support while we work out these issues.

Here’s what happened this week:

Bug Fixes

• Massive improvement to the gotoline feature
• Fix issues with quotation marks and the console
• Functional upgrade for the minimap
• Refactor of the project tree to improve its stability
• Fixes to the Preview button functionality

UI Changes

Features

We hope you like what you see! If you want to stay in touch you can find us on twitter, facebook and of course our new website.www.c9.io

P.S. Don’t forget to update your RSS reader with our new URL: http://c9.io/site/feed/

UI Changes

• Enable code folding by default
• Color picker now closes when the file it’s on also closes
• Change our Windows Azure dialog to the black theme
• Change position of the Zen Mode button to make it easier to activate
• Enforce proper minimum positioning for the panel bar and console

Fixed issues

• Fix “closeallbutme,” “showsettings,” and “closetab” commands from the console
• The “clear” command now only clears console output, not program output
• Backend changes to the way we execute git commands (since GitHub changed their format, too)