Cloudflare Deno and Node.js team up to improve JS interoperability
2 min readCloudflare Deno and Node.js team up to improve JS interoperability
Cloudflare Deno and Node.js team up to improve JS interoperability
Cloudflare has announced that it is working with Deno, the developer behind the Deno runtime, and the Node.js Technical Steering Committee, who will co-create a platform that enables developers to bridge between Deno, Node.js, and Cloudflare’s serverless application platform (Cloudflare Workers).
Standards for writing code. This work will allow applications to move between Cloudflare Workers, Deno, and Node.js without requiring a rewrite, which is currently not possible.
Cloudflare co-founder and CEO Matthew Prince said:
Millions of developers use JavaScript, which is often the first language they learn. So far, the JavaScript standard has focused entirely on the front end.
By standardizing the core JavaScript API, taking into account both the front-end and the back-end, we can give front-end developers more access to the back-end in a way that feels familiar.
Built on Google’s open source V8 JavaScript engine, Node.js unifies web application development around a single programming language, allowing developers to run scripts on the server side to generate dynamic web content before the page is sent to the user’s web browser.
Although Node.js has evolved over a decade, it still lacks interoperability. Developers have to rely on some knowledge and build tools to share code across different JavaScript environments.
Cloudflare, Deno, and some Node.js contributors from the Node.js Technical Steering Committee will develop API-based interoperability standards as part of the W3C’s Web-interoperable Runtimes Community Group.
Together, they will work to make cross-runtime JavaScript tooling and integration easier to leverage, eliminate platform-specific differences, and allow applications to evolve and change over time without requiring rewriting.
So in addition to announcing the partnership, Cloudflare also announced that it will open source the Cloudflare Workers runtime under the Apache 2.0 license.
There are two things that make developers hesitate when adopting any new development platform. Number one: They’re worried about being locked in, and no matter how bullish you are on the technology, if you’re betting your company’s future on a single development platform, you don’t want the possibility of being locked in. Second: As a developer, you want to have a local development environment to quickly iterate and test your changes.
Open-sourcing the Workers runtime solves both of these problems, providing developers with a standard that can run anywhere, meaning both in any hosting environment and on their local machine for fast Test and iterate.
