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Appium 2.0 Officially Released: Extensible Ecosystem for Automation Makes It Easy to Add Your Specific Tests

By Announcement, Appium, Blog, Project Update

We’re delighted to share that Appium 2.0 is now available

Appium is an open source test automation framework for use with native, hybrid, and mobile web apps. Appium is an Impact project under the OpenJS Foundation ecosystem.

Appium drives iOS and Android apps using the WebDriver protocol. Appium can be used for testing native mobile applications (iOS or Android), mobile web applications (Safari or Chrome) and hybrid mobile applications that combine both. This makes it a versatile tool that can be used for a variety of projects. Appium is used by companies like GEICO, Charles Schwab, Walmart, and many more.

“Appium’s vision has always been larger than being a mobile app automation tool. The WebDriver paradigm was a good fit for the web, and it turned out to be a good fit for mobile too. With Appium 2, we wanted testers to be able to reach for a single tool to accomplish all their automation tasks across multiple platforms,” said Jonathan Lipps, Senior Director, Automation Technologies at Headspin, Inc., and the project lead for Appium. “Thank you to all Appium collaborators and contributors. This is a major milestone!”

2.0 reenvisions Appium as a platform where drivers and plugins can be easily created and shared. With a more friendly and standard interface, Appium 2.0 offers:

  • A new system for developing and sharing Appium drivers to facilitate automation of new platforms
  • Plugins that extend or modify any of Appium’s behaviors
  • The ability to install drivers and plugins from across the ecosystem with a single command

Interested in learning more? Join Appium Project Lead Jonathan Lipps for a free webinar on July 11, 9:00-10:00 AM PDT. Register now!

Congratulations to all of the collaborators and contributors on this major launch. Try out Appium 2.0 today!

Meta Joins the OpenJS Foundation

By Announcement, Blog, Jest

The creator of popular open source projects like React, React-Native and Jest, joins the OpenJS Foundation

SAN FRANCISCO – May 10, 2023 – The OpenJS Foundation, providing vendor-neutral support for sustained growth within the open source JavaScript community, is announcing today that Meta has joined as a gold member. 

“Welcome Meta! Their positive effect on the JavaScript ecosystem has been amazing. Heavy users at scale of JavaScript itself, creators of React and React-Native, creators of multiple key open source projects,” said Robin Ginn, OpenJS Foundation Executive Director. “We look forward to working more with Meta’s leadership and expertise to increase support for the diverse open source communities at OpenJS.”

Meta Open Source has been key in creating and open sourcing many projects crucial to the JavaScript ecosystem, such as React, Jest, and Flow. Last year, Meta contributed its popular JavaScript testing project Jest to OpenJS, which garnered an enthusiastic response from developers for this community-led project.

As a global leader with a mission of creating community and bringing people closer together, Meta understands the importance of open collaboration to sustain and improve JavaScript development. Working collectively with other member companies and with the guidance of the OpenJS Foundation, Meta will continue to contribute and advocate in the community. 

“Open source has the potential to be more inclusive and more empowering than ever. Joining the OpenJS Foundation is a large step forward in supporting our open source communities. We hope to provide not only leadership, but to learn from the community,” said Killian Murphy, Sr. Engineering Director, Developer Experience & Platforms. 

“The broader JavaScript ecosystem benefits from Meta becoming an OpenJS Foundation member. In fact, we’ve already been working together in multiple different ways, and this makes official what has already been a great relationship,” said Shayne Boyer, OpenJS Foundation Board Director. “

To learn more about how you can be a part of the OpenJS Foundation, click here.

OpenJS Resources

The OpenJS Foundation is committed to supporting the healthy growth of the JavaScript ecosystem and web technologies by providing a neutral organization to host and sustain projects, as well as collaboratively fund activities for the benefit of the community at large. The OpenJS Foundation is made up of 41 open source JavaScript projects including Appium, Dojo, Jest, jQuery, Node.js, and webpack and is supported by 30 corporate and end-user members, including GoDaddy, Google, IBM, Joyent, Microsoft and Netflix. These members recognize the interconnected nature of the JavaScript ecosystem and the importance of providing a central home for projects which represent significant shared value.

About Meta

Meta builds technologies that help people connect, find communities, and grow businesses. First launching Facebook in 2004, it changed the way people connect. Meta brings apps like Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp to further empower billions around the world. Now, Meta is moving beyond 2D screens toward immersive experiences like augmented and virtual reality to help build the next evolution in social technology.

About Meta Open Source

Meta has long been a supporter of open source software and the open source community. In addition to making a lot of our engineering work publicly available, including sharing our research, code, designs, and engineering work, we also invest in organizations that are important for the long-term sustainability of the open source ecosystem.

About Linux Foundation

Founded in 2000, the Linux Foundation and its projects are supported by more than 2,950 members. The Linux Foundation is the world’s leading home for collaboration on open source software, hardware, standards, and data. Linux Foundation projects are critical to the world’s infrastructure including Linux, Kubernetes, Node.js, ONAP, Hyperledger, RISC-V, and more. The Linux Foundation’s methodology focuses on leveraging best practices and addressing the needs of contributors, users, and solution providers to create sustainable models for open collaboration. For more information, please visit us at linuxfoundation.org.

OpenJS Foundation and the Sovereign Tech Fund: Creating secure and modern technology and policy

OpenJS Foundation Receives Major Government Investment from Sovereign Tech Fund for Web Security and Stability

By Announcement, Blog

Read more details here: OpenJS Foundation Receives Largest One-Time Government Investment

We’re so excited to announce that the OpenJS Foundation has been selected to receive an investment from the Sovereign Tech Fund (STF) to help build the future of JavaScript infrastructure and security. 

The Sovereign Tech Fund, financed by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action, is investing EUR 875,000 (USD 902,000) in the OpenJS Foundation. 

This is the largest one-time government support investment ever to a Linux Foundation project. We’re grateful to the STF team for supporting this initiative!

Our goal is to help our open source projects gain more secure and modern technologies and policies for the web. In collaboration with community leaders in our OpenJS Security Collaboration Space, and the Linux Foundation IT team, we developed a plan that we hope will scale across the JavaScript ecosystem.

We will do the following over the next two years:

  • Deliver infrastructure updates across our project portfolio through a single-scalable solution, while implementing a responsible sunset program for inactive projects.
  • Develop and deliver security and maintenance policies and practices for critical projects.

The OpenJS Foundation’s JavaScript technologies are widely used around the world, and building development infrastructure with longevity and stability remains a key function of the OpenJS Foundation. 

We want to continue to improve and build a JavaScript ecosystem that will continue to flourish over the next decade, and the support from the Sovereign Tech Fund will make that commitment a reality. 

Government support of open source

Governments, the private sector, and individuals all rely on JavaScript, and we pride ourselves on growing our security and trust in the web technologies they use. 

The Sovereign Tech Fund’s investment in the OpenJS Foundation will scale our hosted projects today and in the future. At the same time, it will help our projects adopt more secure and modern technologies and policies, with the goal of being self-sustaining in the future.

We hope that this will start to build a JavaScript ecosystem that will continue to flourish not only in Germany, but around the globe. It’s encouraging to see the German government taking this initiative to improve the lives of citizens by investing in the critical open source infrastructure that powers the web.

Expanding our security practices

We’ve been working to modernize and improve our security practices in other areas, with the help of the Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF) Alpha-Omega project. 

Earlier this year, jQuery received USD 350,000 to reduce potential security incidents by helping modernize its consumers and its code. This is also the second year that Alpha-Omega has funded Node.js – resulting in great progress improving Node.js security – which we’ve been reporting on monthly.

What’s next

We’re excited to begin, and have already engaged members of the Linux Foundation IT team to assist with the work. We’ll be sure to keep our OpenJS blog updated as we make progress!

Big thank you to the Sovereign Tech Fund and the German Ministry for their generous support of open source. We hope that their leadership will inspire governments around the world to follow suit!

The OpenJS Foundation is committed to supporting the healthy growth of the JavaScript ecosystem and web technologies by providing a neutral organization to host and sustain projects, as well as collaboratively fund activities for the benefit of the community at large. The OpenJS Foundation is made up of 41 open source JavaScript projects including Appium, Dojo, Jest, jQuery, Node.js, and webpack and is supported by 30 corporate and end-user members, including GoDaddy, Google, IBM, Joyent, Netflix, and Microsoft. These members recognize the interconnected nature of the JavaScript ecosystem and the importance of providing a central home for projects which represent significant shared value.

OpenSSF Project Alpha-Omega Invests in the OpenJS Foundation and jQuery to Help Secure the Consumer Web

By Announcement, Blog, jQuery, jQuery Security

By: Robin Ginn, Executive Director, OpenJS Foundation and Brian Behlendorf, General Manager, OpenSSF

Today, we’re excited to share that the Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF) Project Alpha-Omega is committing $350,000 to reduce potential security incidents for jQuery by helping modernize its consumers and its code.

This is the second funded project coming from the OpenSSF to the OpenJS Foundation, the neutral home for JavaScript and the web. Earlier this year OpenSSF selected Node.js as its initial project, committing $300,000 to focus on improving supply chain security. 

OpenJS, working with the jQuery maintainers and industry experts, will undertake three core initiatives under this grant: an ecosystem risk audit, an expansion of its infrastructure modernization project, and a web modernization campaign.

“There’s a lot of work to be done to help secure the consumer web,” said Michael Scovetta, Alpha-Omega co-lead and Principal Security PM Manager at Microsoft. “We believe partnering with the vendor-neutral OpenJS Foundation is a great way to communicate out broadly to developers and to work with technology partners to reduce potential security incidents for jQuery. This is a wide ranging effort that is by no means simple.” 

jQuery Core is still actively maintained, and the maintainers have taken steps to consolidate and modernize its infrastructure with support from the OpenJS Foundation including migrating and improving its CDN. jQuery is still used by 77% of the world’s top 10 million websites, but one-third of those sites are still using 15-year-old legacy jQuery 1.x when they should be using a much more current version.

As part of its modernization initiative, OpenJS Foundation has also helped jQuery with two projects under the jQuery umbrella through a careful transition: jQuery UI and jQuery Mobile. However, there is much work to be done to fully understand and mitigate potential risks.  

“The use of ubiquitous technologies like jQuery is invisible to most, however potential problems could affect millions of websites. And, there’s no one-size-fits-all solution. This is exactly the type of project that the OpenSSF is looking to support, and we are excited to be working on our second project with the OpenJS Foundation, helping to advance open source security for all,” said Michael Winser, Alpha-Omega co-lead and Group Product Manager for Software Supply Chain Security and CI/CD at Google. “We are pleased to be committing to this project with the OpenJS Foundation and jQuery.”

The OpenJS Foundation  and OpenSSF are looking forward to working closely together to help developers around the globe improve their open source security readiness!


If you’re interested in finding out how you can help, please contact the OpenJS Foundation via https://openjsf.org/collaboration/.

Node.js 19 is now available!

By Announcement, Blog, Node.js

The release of Node.js 19 is now available! Node.js 19 replaces Node.js 18 as our current release line, with Node.js 18 being promoted to long-term support (LTS) next week.

What do these two releases mean? Node.js 19 is ready for early feature testing, and Node.js 18 LTS will be fully ready for production deployments starting next week, October 25.

Rafael Gonzaga from Nearform and Ruy Adorno from Google have been working as the release leads for this version.

“With over 1,150 commits since the last release, Node.js continues to improve along a broad spectrum of functionality. Improvements in connectivity, performance and throughput are important parts of Node.js 19. We’ve been working hard on making Node.js more secure and performant, and I believe we are getting better and better. If you’re in active deployment, Node.js 18 LTS is for you. If you’re interested in getting access to features early, Node.js 19 is ready,” said Rafael Gonzaga, Node.js Core Member. “Many thanks to our open source contributors for making Node.js better and better.”

What’s exciting about Node.js 19 is that you can expect new releases approximately every two weeks, always keeping you up to date with the latest features and changes. Since this is an odd-numbered release line, Node.js 19 will not be promoted to LTS. You can read more about our release policy at https://github.com/nodejs/release.

The increased frequency of Node.js releases means that cool features are now being added over time, yet Node.js 19 includes several updates.

“Node.js releases are fundamentally a team effort, and, more broadly, a community effort. Node.js 19 and Node.js 18 LTS are great examples of this with input and code from a wide range of developers,” said Ruy Adorno, Node.js Release Working Group Chair and Senior Software Developer, Google. “Try out Node.js yourself, and if you have contributions, we are very interested in working with you.”

Main updates for Node.js 19

  • HTTP(S)/1.1 KeepAlive by now set by default
  • Custom ESM Resolution Adjustments
  • Dropped support for DTrace/SystemTap/ETW
  • Updated V8 JavaScript engine to 10.7
  • llhttp 8.1.0

HTTP(S)/1.1 KeepAlive by default

Node.js now sets keepAlive to true by default. Outgoing HTTP or HTTPs connections will automatically use HTTP 1.1 Keep-Alive. It could be set this way before but specific parameters needed to be set. Now it’s by default. This means better performance and throughput by default.

Custom ESM Resolution Adjustments

Node.js has removed the –experimental-specifier-resolution flag. Its functionality can now be achieved via custom loaders. 

Dropped support for DTrace/SystemTap/ETW

DTrace can be used to get a global overview of a running system, such as the amount of memory, CPU time, filesystem and network resources used by the active processes. It can be an important tool, but keeping it up-to-date is complex, and it was decided we don’t have personnel to properly support it. If you are interested in helping to bring DTrace back, an issue has been opened here: github.com/nodejs/node/issues/44550

Updated V8 JavaScript engine to 10.7

The V8 engine is what powers Node.js. It parses and runs your JavaScript inside a Node environment. Node.js follows updates to the V8 JavaScript engine closely. 

This version includes a new feature to the JavaScript API: `Intl.NumberFormat`. `Intl.NumberFormat` v3 API is a new TC39 ECMA402 stage 3 proposal extending the pre-existing Intl.NumberFormat.

llhttp 8.1.0

This project is a port of http_parser to TypeScript. It is used to generate the output C source file, which can be compiled and linked with an embedder’s program like Node.js. It parses both requests and responses. The parser is designed to be used in performance HTTP applications. The Node.js team is regularly improving llhttp with new API features and new callbacks.

Try it out today

To download Node.js v19.0.0, visit: https://nodejs.org/en/download/current/.  Check out the release post at https://nodejs.org/en/blog/release/v19.0.0, which contains the list of commits included in this release. The team would love to hear your feedback! 

“Thank you to Rafael and Ruy for taking on this release, and thank you to our community – your feedback is so important for the iteration of Node.js,” said Senior Software Engineer at Red Hat, Node.js TSC Member, and prior major release steward, Bethany Griggs. “As a long time maintainer of Node.js, hearing from the community allows us to push these releases more efficiently.”

Testing your applications and modules with Node.js 19  helps to ensure the future compatibility of your project with the latest Node.js changes and features.

For the timeline of Node.js releases, check out the Node.js Release Schedule.

“We look forward to what the community will build with the release of Node.js 19,” said OpenJS Foundation Executive Director Robin Ginn. “With each release, the team is quickly working to ensure developers are always up to date and able to test out new features.”

Thank you

We’d like to thank all of the Node.js collaborators and contributors, as this release and upcoming ones are a direct result of their efforts!