Choices are an important part of a healthy open source software community. That’s why we’re excited about Yarn, a new package manager that addresses many of the problems with Node’s default package manager, npm. While npm has done a fantastic job creating a large and vibrant JavaScript ecosystem, I want to share why Yarn is an important addition to the Node.js ecosystem, how it will improve your Node.js development experience, and how Heroku has incorporated it into the build process for your Heroku apps.

We began testing Yarn almost immediately after it was released, and began fully supporting it on December 16.

About Yarn

Yarn was released in October 2016 and made a big splash...

Today we are announcing the newest version of the Heroku CLI. We know how much time you spend in the CLI as developers and how much pride you take in being able to get things done quickly. Our new CLI has big improvements in performance as well as enhanced readability for humans and machines.

Tuned for Performance

CLI response time is made up of two parts: the API response time and the performance of the CLI itself, and the latter is where we’ve made big improvements. While a typical Unix user should experience responses that are around half a second faster, the biggest gains are for Windows users, as the new CLI no longer has a Ruby wrapper.

When we measured the time it takes for the...

So you want to build an app with React? "Getting started" is easy… and then what?

React is a library for building user interfaces, which comprise only one part of an app. Deciding on all the other parts — styles, routers, npm modules, ES6 code, bundling and more — and then figuring out how to use them is a drain on developers. This has become known as javascript fatigue. Despite this complexity, usage of React continues to grow.

The community answers this challenge by sharing boilerplates. These boilerplates reveal the profusion of architectural choices developers must make. That official "Getting Started" seems so far away from the reality of an operational app.

Based in Budapest, Hungary, Andras Fincza (Head of Engineering) and Rafael Ördög (Technical Lead) work for Emarsys, a global marketing automation platform. Read our Emarsys customer story to learn more about their migration experience on Heroku.

How did you introduce microservices at Emarsys?

We take an evolutionary approach to our architecture. Our marketing automation platform was originally designed as a monolithic system built in PHP and MySQL and running on in-house infrastructure. We were running two major services on our in-house infrastructure: one for HDS (historical data service) and the other for smart insights and analysis. However, it was hard to grow the platform...

Last week, Terence Lee and I caught up with Tom Dale at EmberConf to talk about FastBoot, when you should avoid native apps, and why JavaScript on the server and the browser might start to converge. Check the end for the full recording!

So let's start with the drama, would you say Ember has declared war on native apps? [laughs]

[sigh] Yeah. Yeah, I think that's fair. Yeah. Sure. Why not? Let's go with that.

A lot of other frameworks, take this approach of bringing web technologies and dropping them into native experiences - React Native being the prime example. It seems that Ember wants to bring back the glory days for web technologies - is that right?

Yeah, absolutely. I...