I saw Matt Schmulen of StrongLoop speak of StrongLoop in general on Thursday night.

Matt Schmulen (pictured here with Johnathan Hebert at right who runs The JavaScript Austin Meetup Group where the talk was held) asserted that StrongLoop is a middle layer, running in Node, for JavaScript applications. Instead of binding a Dojo app to Mongo you could bind the app to StrongLoop's endpoints and then StrongLoop would talk to Mongo instead. This decouples Dojox and MongoDB in your app and makes the front end and the backend swapoutable to some extent via loose coupling. StrongLoop interfaces with numerous frontends and backends. The backend does not have to be a database. It could be the Facebook API. If you think about a traditional three-layered application in which the data layer bleeds into the business logic which bleeds into the UI, then StrongLoop's stuff is of the middle layer (the business logic). A distro is a distributed version of an application and a StrongLoop Node.js distro may be spun up at Rackspace for your UI to talk to. It is hard to get Node rolled out in big businesses as there is no one to support it, but StrongLoop makes its money by offering contracts to support its own stuff. They are the people to call in the middle of a seasonal sales spike when the Node stuff falls down.

• github.com/strongloop has all of their npm modules. All of their technology is free. It is the support contracts that feeds/fuels the free.
• github.com/strongloop-community has a bunch of "Hello World" examples for how to do stuff with StrongLoop tooling. StrongLoop knows you have to become an addict first before you ask for help.
• The Node Republic is a community that StrongLoop watches for wants and trends. This steers what it spends time developing.

 
 

Other interesting things mentioned during this talk:

• swagger is for pimping out RESTful APIs and helps you manage your Posts and Gets.
• AFNetworking stands for Alamo Fire Networking and is a set of Networking Tools for the iOS space. In glancing at their site I see a lot of serialization and deserialization stuff. An Alamo Fire is a kind of Bluebonnet. It's Texasesque.
• iOS7 supports JavaScript-binding natively! An iOS app may be written in JavaScript and then pushed to Objective-C.
• ObjectRocket is a database-as-a-service (DBaaS) that lives in the cloud and is of MongoDB.
• node-inspector is for inspecting server-side (Node) code via tools not unlike the Google Chrome Developer Tools.