ArangoDB 2.5 comes with an upgraded version of V8, Google’s open source JavaScript engine.

The built-in version of V8 has been upgraded from 3.29.54 to 3.31.74.1.

With the ArangoDB Foxx Microservice Framework we’ve introduced an easy way to create a Web API right on top of the NoSQL database.

In early January Max challenged Andreas (AngularJS / NodeJS) that they could build a full-stack application within half a day.

The web application – in short – is a guessing game, in which the computer tries to guess a thing or animal you think of by asking a series of questions, for which you provide the answers. Here’s a demo:

http://guesser.9hoeffer.de:8000

The new Javascript driver no longer imposes any promises implementation. It follows the standard callback pattern with a callback using err and res.

I wanted to give the new driver a try. A github crawler seemed like a good side-project, especially because the node-github driver follows the same conventions as the Javascript driver.

There are a lot of promise libraries out there. The most popular one – according to NPM – was promises. It should be possible to use any implementation. Therefore I used this one.

The following source code can be found on github.

The most powerful way to query your data in ArangoDB is by using ArangoDB’s own query language, AQL. In the past using AQL in your JavaScript code sadly would often require writing long, unwieldy strings. This made writing complex queries difficult and could often lead to subtle syntax errors or mistakes.

The ArangoDB Query Builder (AQB) is a JavaScript node packaged module that provides a fluid API for writing AQL queries in plain JavaScript. And if you’re using ArangoDB 2.3, the aqb module is already available to your Foxx applications. Let’s say we want to perform the following query in..

Handling binary data in JavaScript applications is a bit tricky because JavaScript does not provide a data type for binary data. This post explains how to use binary data in JavaScript actions written using ArangoDB’s Foxx.

Foxx’ main purpose is to create a beautiful API for your AngularJS, EmberJS or Backbone.js front-end. However, sometimes you want to do more. We, for example, needed to parse some HTML files. ArangoDB is capable of using some Node.js modules, but unfortunately Cheerio was not one of those. One problem was that we did not support loading of JSON data modules. So, this was a good excuse to rewrite the module loader in ArangoDB to make it even more Node.js-friendly.

Test Driven Development

I have been one of the lucky attendants of scotland.js in Edinburgh recently.It was a really nice & informative conference, thanks to all people that made it possible.I did really like to see that TDD is reaching the front-end developers finally.A lot of useful tools for this have been presented by James Shore, Bernard Kobos and Sebastian Golasch.In ArangoDB, TDD is in action all day and I am looking forward to improving our front-end testing even further using these awesome tools.

Front-end Development meets NoSQL

Furthermore several talks focussing on front-end..

It has taken some time, but now part 2 of the Foxx Screencast is available. I talk about some more advanced topics of Foxx and also plans for the future.

In my blog post about npm packages, I tried to use underscore for ArangoDB. I found that the easiest way to archive this, is using the nodes package manager NPM. Node packages and modules follow the Common.JS specification, so they can be used by ArangoDB.

ArangoDB follows the Common.JS specification for modules. However, it would be very convenient, if there was an easy way to install a package like “underscore.js”. These package are, for instance, available using NPM. There is a draft for packages on Common.JS which seems to be compatible with NPM.