I went to the first Philadelphia Node.JS meetup last night hosted by Zivtech. It was a mix of local developers at various stages in their careers. There were several informative impromptu presentations, including a demonstration of file transfer using web sockets and Node.JS and sending Apple IOS push notifications from Node.JS.
Useful libraries:
- Socket.io – use websockets to push notifications to the browser
- Meteor – This is a group trying to speed up deployment by push code updates to the browser(!) – may be half baked right now but could be an interesting project to browse
- Backbone.js – MVC style library + a history management library for twitter hashtag style URLs, to prevent refresh
- jsbeautify – Vim script to format Javascript
- couchdb – For people who really want to do everything in javascript, this is a JSON database queried with Javascript Map-Reduce queries
- ejs – Javascript templating library, seems to be pretty popular
- Underscore.js – Functional programming style collections library