Going forward

[niieani]

Some steps we should take to migrate this repo into 2016:

• Publish to NPM Node modules need to be renamed and pushed to NPM #1
• Merge as many good PRs/forks we can from the original repo
• Switch to Webpack instead of the manual build step for better and more maintainable build process
• Convert to ES6+/Babel or preferably TypeScript to provide good type declarations and faster iteration. Lebab might be helpful.
• See if we can get rid of streamws - the ws fork. It only has minor changes over the original, but is really outdated. The changes it introduces are fairly small, so instead of maintaining it, it would be better to PR an optional streaming mode to the original ws, unless it is already possible to do
• See what improvements can be done to the BinaryPack package and whether modern alternative have been created in the past 4 years that we could use instead
• Build docs and engage the community
• Consider writing a transformer for Primus

[phutchins]

This is a great list to tackle. I'm going to review our other thread and then we can start on running down this list.

[phutchins]

I'm iffy on doing something like Babel or TypeScript. I admittedly don't have much experience with either but I generally like to stick to pure JS as it's most easily debugged by the majority of the community. Thoughts?

[niieani]

I believe the majority of the JS community active in 2016 is already using either Babel or TypeScript. To name a few:

• React (Babel + Flow)
• Angular2 (TypeScript)
• Cycle.js (TypeScript)
• RethinkDB Horizon (Babel, soon switching to TypeScript)
• Apollo Framework, the next generation of Meteor (TypeScript)
• Visual Studio Code and its Monaco editor (TypeScript)
• Vue 2 (Babel)
• RxJS (Babel + TypeScript declarations)
• Aurelia (Babel + TypeScript declarations)

...and so on. All of the above either started in 2015 or 2016. The community is very strong.
There is also a tremendous benefit in using either (especially TypeScript, for extra type-safety and amazing tooling), since you can safely use ES6+ functionality, while still not requiring users to use the latest version of either Node or the Browsers (evergreen browsers and Node 6 support most ES6 features anyway).

The story for debugging transpiled code is pretty good - the projects had a few years and both are pretty mature, used by big players like Facebook, Microsoft and Google. The code is much cleaner too, as it can be more succinct, use object and array destructuring, rest arguments, native classes and so on. I'd say there's no reason not to go there, unless we deliberately want to make our lives more difficult. :)

[benhalverson]

Are you guys working on this? +1 for Typescript @niieani @phutchins

[phutchins]

I've been quite busy with the holiday but would like to get back on this now that things are calming down.

@niieani, do you have time to get back on this with us?

I'd like to take a look at the PR's in the orig repo and start reviewing so that we can merge.

Looks like there are 3...

binaryjs#102 - Support custom notifications
binaryjs#40 - New option to control stream id generation
binaryjs#39 - add bytesWritten to messageBytesWritten

Thoughts?

[niieani]

I think it would be nice to look at getting rid of the ancient streamws dependency in favor of an up-to-date ws before adding features. But we should definitely look at all the PRs. We'd need to see if it all still works after updating ws to the latest version too.

I won't have time to work on this until mid/end of February, I think.

[wision]

I did manage to replace streamws with ws and later on with uws on our local fork. Let me know, if you are interested in diffs.

[niieani]

@wision sounds good! I didn't have time to tackle the issues yet, but if the diffs are simple enough, just might finally take the time to release this. 👍

[wision]

ws: https://gist.github.com/wision/813af88cde7a447401924ad72c64ec87
uws: https://gist.github.com/wision/90afc18d2e728c4d2c7f5701a251831b
uws was tested with nodejs8

Btw I've seen some forks on github, which already switched to ws.. you might want to look there and even check, if some those forks didn't publish their version already.