Live broadcast at http://live.forwardtechnology.co.uk for those who could not make the event.

First talk by George Ornbo (@shapeshed) – he’s writing a book about Node.js development.

Node tries to deal with quite ‘mad’ problems in programming where lots of things happen at the same time.

Many people see JavaScript as a joke language, but Apache (in real time programms) has to do a lot of work on the back end if utilised, so there is a trade-off to be made.

George shows a Node based ‘Hello World’ server code example.

Callbacks are crucial for node.js developers – they can be a bit tricky to get into initially, but they are well worth getting familiar with.

George shows an app which shows the number of tweets using words ‘love’ and ‘hate’ and displays them as a graph in real time with lots of events coming through per second.

George recommends:

• expressjs.com
• socket.io
• github.com/substack/dnode (blows mind)
• leftlogic.com/training#node (by Remy Sharp)

Q&A wraps up and people head over to the free pizza spot!

Arduino voting machine 

Mairead Buchan (@tiny_m) demonstrates the Arduino voting machine which received a lot of interesting views and smiles from developers

The tool picks up a lot of laughs from the developers in the room!

LNUG (London Node User Group) 

Andrew plugging the project, which has been built in node.js and the event is happening next week at Forward.

github.com/forward/lnug – open source code available to work on.

The whole thing is written in Coffee Script.

Andrew show Github page for Sizlate library which he is saying does a good job in separating concerns between different types of developers and designers on the project.

Check out mongoosejs.com as an ORM for MongoDB.

Simon Thompson 

Showing his app which enables him to drop events onto calendar of dates (by the looks of it).

Simon running through some express code which he has used for the app.

Simon talks about the hardest thing he had to do was to query the data using something like mongoose.js.

There doesn’t seem to be an awful lot of documentation available for mongoose.js.