Amazon connects node.js to AWS services

Amazon is providing a way for one of the most popular JavaScript extensions, node.js, to easily access the Amazon Web Service collection of cloud computing capabilities.

The AWS Developer Tools Team has released a preview of an SDK (software development kit) that will provide a way for developers to call Amazon services from their own node.js-based programs.

The SDK will provide an easy way to tap into Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service), Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud), and the Amazon Simple Workflow Service. The Amazon developers are also soliciting suggestions about how to improve the SDK.

Node.js provides "an event-driven non-blocking I/O model to allow your applications to scale while keeping you from having to deal with threads, polling, timeouts, and event loops," Amazon Web Services explained. "You can, for example, initiate and manage parallel calls to several Web services in a clean and obvious fashion."

Node.js is a server-side platform for running JavaScript code. Running JavaScript on the server, rather than within the client's browser, can speed execution time of complex web applications. It uses the speedy Google JavaScript Engine V8.

The node.js platform has proven to be quite popular since its launch in 2009. Node.js is the second most popular package on the GitHub repository of open source projects, after the Bootstrap Web development framework.

Amazon is not the first hosted development platform to work closely with node.js. PaaS (platform-as-a-service) provider EngineYard started offering the JavaScript package as a hosted service in August.

Amazon's SDK can be downloaded as an npm (Node Packaged Module) and installed on the developer's machine. The SDK is available at no cost under the Apache License, Version 2.0. Amazon also provides a guide on how to get started using node.js.