Today we’re pleased to announce the official release of Horizon 2.0, codenamed Mt. Whitney. You can install it today from npm.

Horizon 2.0 introduces a powerful new query aggregation feature, support for the Auth0 cloud service, several noteworthy architectural changes, and many bug fixes. The release represents the first round of improvements that we’ve implemented in collaboration with our user community since Horizon’s launch in May.

Transport Layer Security (TLS) helps protect network communication from eavesdropping and man-in-the-middle attacks. Enabling TLS everywhere is increasingly regarded as a best practice, but it’s especially important in applications that accept sensitive information or perform user authentication.

In the past, the cost and difficulty of obtaining certificates created barriers to ubiquitous TLS adoption. That changed when a group of companies and non-profit organizations launched Let’s Encrypt, a largely automated system that dispenses certificates at no cost. In this tutorial, I’ll describe how you can TLS-enable your Horizon application in a matter of minutes using a free certificate from Let’s Encrypt.

September 14: This post has been updated to use the Horizon 2.0 API.

In this tutorial, I’ll demonstrate how to build a social bookmark manager with Horizon and the Vue.js frontend framework. You can build the entire application without writing a single line of backend code. This tutorial also covers some of the best practices for developing with Horizon.

Starting today, we’re sponsoring $500 for the best content written about Horizon during Pluralsight’s hack.guides() 2016 Tutorial Contest.

If you’re not familiar with hack.guides(), it’s a developer community for writing technical guides. It’s a great way to collaborate with other writers and help spread your knowledge across a growing open-source community!

Last week we announced the first release of Horizon, an open-source backend for realtime web applications. Developers can use the Horizon server and its frontend client library to build and scale realtime web applications without writing any backend code. Built on top of RethinkDB, Horizon extends the database’s built-in support for live updates all the way to the frontend.

To help you get started with Horizon right away, we worked with our friends at Digital Ocean to put together a One-Click Application. You can use it to setup Horizon on Digital Ocean, with all of the dependencies that you will need to get your application up and running. It includes RethinkDB, Node.js, the Horizon server, and Nginx. You can follow their tutorial to deploy your first Horizon application.