I’m Skyla, RethinkDB’s canine-in-residence. My vitally important responsibilities at the office include terrorizing the UPS delivery man, gazing intently at the team while they eat lunch, relentlessly gnawing stuffed animals, and pursuing the insidious red dot. I’ve recently taken up computer programming so that I can help the team build RethinkDB demos. In this tutorial, I will demonstrate how to build a realtime web application with RethinkDB and Dogescript.

Dogescript is a dynamic programming language designed to reflect the unique canine patois popularly associated with doges. The language transpiles to JavaScript, which means that users can take advantage of a large ecosystem of existing libraries and frameworks. You can adopt Dogescript today without giving up indispensable packages like left-pad.

My full-stack Dogescript demo uses Node.js on the backend. The frontend is built with the handlebars templating library and jQuery. The application, which is called Dogechat, displays a chat room with realtime messaging. It helpfully shows each message as a doge meme.

Like many other modern JSON databases, RethinkDB is schemaless: the developer doesn’t have to define a fixed structure or specify field types when creating a new table. In cases where validation is desirable, it’s up to the developer to build it into their application.

Shifting the responsibility for input validation from the persistence layer to the application layer gives developers a lot of flexibility in how they choose to implement the capability. This blog post demonstrates several ways to validate input in Node.js web applications.

At a recent meetup in San Francisco, our CEO Slava Akhmechet introduced some of the new features coming in 2016. His presentation included an early look at Horizon, an upcoming framework that extends RethinkDB to the browser and makes it possible for developers to build realtime web applications without writing backend code. You can watch a complete video recording of the talk, embedded below:

Google is currently developing V8 4.9, which will ship in the upcoming Chrome 49 release. V8 4.9 is a particularly exciting update, because it includes support for 91% of the ECMAScript 2015 (ES6) standard. When Node.js 6 launches with these V8 improvements, powerful new language features like destructuring assignment and proxies will work out of the box–without requiring special measures like command line flags or transpilers.

Although Node 6.0 isn’t scheduled for release until April, you can experience a little bit of the future today by compiling Node’s vee-eight-4.9 branch from source code. The vee-eight branches are where Node’s maintainers do the heavy lifting to make Node compatible with new versions of V8. The code from these branches is understandably not suitable for use in production environments, but it’s a fun a way to get an early look at coming improvements.

In this blog post, I’m going to walk you through a handful of the new ES6 features that you can use out of the box in the vee-eight-4.9 branch. It’s worth noting that many of these features are also available for testing in Node 5.x by using Babel or command line flags if you want to follow along without compiling.

We’re pleased to announce today that RethinkDB is now available for Windows. You can download a Developer Preview of our Windows build, which runs natively on Microsoft’s operating system.

Support for Windows is one of the features most frequently requested by RethinkDB users. We launched an ambitious engineering project to port RethinkDB to Windows–an undertaking that required a year of intensive development, touching nearly every part of the database.

To try today’s Developer Preview, simply download RethinkDB as an executable and run it on a Windows machine. We’re making the preview available today so that our users can start exploring RethinkDB on Windows and help us test it in the real world. You shouldn’t trust it with your data or use it in production environments yet. It’s also not fully optimized, so you might not get the same performance that you would from a stable release.