What happened during 2020?
The Node.js ZooKeeper Client - simply called zookeeper - have been released 5 times and the current version is now 4.7.1.
🎉 Packaging
The source code is packaged differently, making the footprint a lot smaller and the install process simplified. To summarize: the ZooKeeper lost weight.
🎉 Prebuilds make the install process really, really fast
The install process is faster than ever. If you are a Mac OS X or Windows user, there is no longer any need to build an AddOn during the install process. Everything is already included in the package, thanks to a cool tool called prebuildify. Linux user? Don't worry, the installer will quickly build a Native Node.js AddOn for the Linux flavor you are running. During 2021 we will probably include prebuilds for the most common Linux flavors.
🎉 TypeScript
TypeScript declarations makes the Developer Experience very nice. With type hints, function parameter docs and autocomplete.
🎉 async zookeeper
Promise based functions are the default.
await client.create(path, data, constants.ZOO_EPHEMERAL);
🎉 Same client for all platforms
The same version of the C Client source code is now used in Linux, Mac OS X and Windows 10 to build a Node.js native AddOn. Before that, there was an issue with Windows clients connecting to a ZooKeeper server v3.4.8 that made us add a workaround - reverting to a really old client version for Windows users. But that is now solved and all platforms share the same set of modern features. Yay!
🚀 What's next?
Adding support for the new node types introduced in Apache ZooKeeper server v3.5.5:
Container and TTL. The features will probably be released during January 2021.
🎉 Happy New Year! 🎉