Is the latest mongodb native driver mature enough to use with for instance GridFS in a production environment or as specification in a large project?
Referring to http://mongodb.github.com/node-mongodb-native
I would like to consider the rapid changing conventions, as opposed to the maturity of the technology. In short, is it safe to select a version as specification for a high profile production environment?
My limited experience with the technology does not allow me to determine if it would be safe to use in a locked down specification scenario, or even version lock down as per long term support aka Ubuntu, where fix/security patches are OK as opposed to version changes.
Yes. This driver is mature enough to use in production. It is being used in many high profile Node.js deployments already and supports a feature set on par with existing MongoDB drivers. It is also put through the same testing as other MongoDB drivers and performs sufficiently well.
On the MongoDB side there should not be any concern about rapidly changing conventions. The API has shown stability over the past few releases and hasn't introduced any breaking changes through many releases.
Are you really sure that you want to use young technology in the kind of setting you are describing? It requires a lot of maturity for a project to start doing long term support of older versions.
Also in the open source world you rarely see the project itself providing any kind of long term support. Instead you have companies like Canonical and RedHat backporting patches to their specific versions of i.e. MySQL. 10Gen is the company behind MongoDB and mongodb-native and they would be the right ones to ask about long term support.
My experience with mongodb-native is that is a very rapidly improving project and you really need to keep up with what is going on. I would not like to support anything where the mongodb-native version is set in stone for the next n years.
Having said that MongoDB, Node.JS, and mongodb-native are certainly production ready if you are prepared to stay abreast with their rapid development.