The React team has released a stable version of React v15.0, which follows the previous 0.14 version. With this release, React no longer actively supports Internet Explorer 8, among other new features and bug fixes.

As part of this release, the React team would like to start welcoming community contributions. As a way of receiving community contributions, the team will start publishing React core team weekly meeting notes again, wrote React in a blog. The team will also introduce a RFC process inspired by Ember RFCs so external contributors can contribute to the future development of React.

Now, the Facebook codebase has more than 20,000 React components, not including React Native, so the team has been trying to introduce changes gradually. If the code is free of warnings when running under React 0.14, upgrading should be easy, according to the blog. Additionally, there are improvements and warnings aimed at developers with this release.

Amazon Web Services announces AWS Lambda functions
Amazon Web Services has announced that AWS Lambda functions can be developed using the Node.js 4.3.2 runtime. The new runtime version was available as of yesterday, and it can be used by specifying a runtime parameter value of “nodejs4.3” when creating or updating functions.

AWS will continue to support creating new Lambda functions on Node.js 0.10, but starting in October, developers will no longer be able to create functions using Node.js 0.10, given the upcoming end of life for the runtime, according to the AWS Compute blog.

The new Node features include being able to leverage features in the V8 JavaScript engine such as ES6 support, block scoping, and promises. For static modules, AWS suggested compiling for 0.10 before porting existing Node.js 0.10 functions over to Node.js 4.3.2. AWS also suggested reviewing the API changes between Node.js 0.10 and Node.js 4 to see if any might affect the code.

One other feature that AWS highlighted is Node callbacks.