Month: August 2024

#​702 — August 29, 2024

Read on the Web

JavaScript Weekly

Rspack 1.0: The Rust-Powered JavaScript Bundler — Far from being ‘yet another bundler’ with its own approach and terminology to learn, Rspack prides itself on being webpack API and ecosystem compatible, while offering many times the performance. The team now considers it production ready and encourages you to try your webpack-based projects on it.

Rspack Contributors

💡 Rspack also has a family of ancillary tools worth checking out, such as Rsdoctor, a tool for analyzing and visualizing your build process (for both Rspack and webpack!)

Front-End System Design — Learn to create scalable, efficient user interfaces in this extensive video course by Evgennii Ray. Explore the box model, browser rendering, DOM manipulation, state management, performance and much more.

Frontend Masters sponsor

How to Create an NPM Package in 2024 — Sounds simple, but there are a lot of steps involved if you want to follow best practices, introduce useful tools, and get things just right. Matt Pocock walks through the process here, and there’s a 14-minute screencast too, if you’d prefer to watch along.

Matt Pocock

IN BRIEF:

🤖 v0 is an AI-powered tool from Vercel for, originally, generating shadcn/ui-powered React components based upon prompts you supply. Now, however, it has basic Vue.js support too.

Deno 1.46 has been released and promises to be the final 1.x release before the much awaited Deno 2.0. Deno’s Node compatibility improves even more (it now supports Playwright and many more things) and ships with V8 12.9.

📊 IEEE has published its latest annual list of top programming languages. JavaScript takes third place, but TypeScript has leapt up several places to fourth.

RELEASES:

Prisma 5.19 – The popular ORM for Node.js and TypeScript adds ‘TypedSQL’, a way to write raw SQL queries in a type-safe way.

📈 billboard.js 3.13 – Popular D3 chart library adds area-step-range charts.

pnpm 9.9 – Fast, space efficient package manager.

React Email 3.0, Ember 5.11, Bun v1.1.26

📒 Articles & Tutorials

JS Dates are About to Be Fixed — Handling dates and times is famously a painful area for programmers and JavaScript hasn’t done a lot to make it easier. Libraries like Moment.js help a lot, but Iago looks at how the Temporal proposal and its features will begin to help a lot more over time.

Iago Lastra

Weekly Chats on the Art and Practice of Programming — Your home for weekly conversations with fascinating guests about how technology is made and where it’s headed.

The Stack Overflow Podcast sponsor

JavaScript Generators Explained — Jan was frustrated by the quality of documentation and articles explaining generators in JavaScript, and set out to explain things in a way that a more advanced developer could appreciate.

Jan Hesters

Implementing a React-a-Like from Scratch — While it’s unlikely you’ll actually want to do this, at least thinking about it can prove instructive as to what’s going on in React’s engine room.

Robby Pruzan

▶  How to Implement the 2048 Game in JavaScript — Ania is back with one of her usual easy to follow walkthroughs of implementing a complete game in JavaScript. This time it’s the 2048 sliding puzzle game. (Two weeks ago she did Tic-Tac-Toe as well.)

Ania Kubów

Learn Role-Based Access Control and Simplify Permissions Management — Enhance security and streamline access by managing user roles with Clerk Organizations.

Clerk sponsor

📄 The Only Widely Recognized JS Feature Ever Deprecated – Spoiler: It’s with. Trevor Lasn

📄 Generating Unique Random Numbers in JavaScript Using Sets Amejimaobari

📺 21 Talks from the Chain React 2024 Conference – A React Native event. YouTube

📄 Exposing Internal Methods on Vue Custom Elements Jaime Jones

📄 The Interface Segregation Principle in React Alex Kondov

🛠 Code & Tools

TypeScript 5.6 Release Candidate — As always, Daniel presents an epic roundup of what’s new. We’ll focus more on it next week though, as the final release is anticipated to land next Tuesday (September 3).

Daniel Rosenwasser (Microsoft)

Vuestic UI 1.10: A Vue.js 3.0 UI Framework — Features 60 customizable and responsive components and with the v1.10 release it’s gained a significant bundle size optimization, a custom compiler that improves build time performance, and other minor enhancements. GitHub repo.

Vuestic UI

✅ Bye Bye Bugs — Get 80% automated E2E test coverage for mobile and web apps in under 4 months with QA Wolf. With QA cycles complete in minutes (not days), bugs don’t stand a chance. Schedule a demo.

QA Wolf sponsor

Material UI v6: The Popular React UI Design/Component System — At ten years old, the popular design system has its latest major release. There’s a focus on improved theming, color scheme management, container queries, and React 19 support. There are revamped templates to be inspired by, too.

García, Bittu, Andai, et al.

npm-check-updates 17.0: Update package.json Dependencies to Latest Versions — That is, as opposed to the specified versions. It includes a handy -i interactive mode so you can look at potential upgrades and then opt in to them one by one.

Raine Revere

Code Hike 1.0: Turn Markdown into Rich Interactive Experiences — Aimed at use cases like code walkthroughs and interactive docs, Code Hike bridges the gap between Markdown and React when creating technical content that takes full advantage of the modern web.

Rodrigo Pombo

Calendar.js: A Calendar Control with Drag and Drop — A responsive calendar with no dependencies, full drag and drop support (even between calendars), and many ways to manage events with recurring events, exporting, holidays, and more.

William Troup

📊 Perspective 3.0 – Data visualization and analytics component. The core is written in C++ and compiled to WebAssembly where it can be used from JavaScript. Their homepage shows it off well with a live example.

json-viewer 3.5 – Display JSON data in a readable, user-friendly way.

♟️ Stockfish.js 16.1 – A JavaScript chess engine.

jest-dom 6.5 – Jest matchers to test DOM state.

Marked 14.1 – Fast Markdown compiler / parser.

Javet 3.1.5 – Java + V8. Embed JS into Java.

Pixi.js 8.3.4 – Fast 2D on WebGL engine.

#​701 — August 22, 2024

Read on the Web

JavaScript Weekly

Regexes Got Good: The History (and Future) of Regular Expressions in JavaScript — Regular expression support was always a little underwhelming in JS, but things have improved. Steven takes us on a tour to refresh our knowledge, as well as show off his ‘regex’ library that boosts JS regexes to a true A++ rating. Steven was co-author of O’Reilly’s Regular Expressions Cookbook and High Performance JavaScript so knows his stuff.

Steven Levithan

WorkOS: The Modern Identity Platform for B2B SaaS — WorkOS is a modern identity platform for B2B SaaS, offering flexible and easy-to-use APIs to integrate SSO, SCIM, and RBAC in minutes instead of months. It’s trusted by hundreds of high-growth startups such as Perplexity, Vercel, Drata, and Webflow.

WorkOS sponsor

Node v22.7.0 (Current) Released — Node 22.6 let you strip types from source code, but now with –experimental-transform-types you can transform TypeScript-only syntax into JavaScript before running it too. Module syntax detection is now also enabled by default.

Rafael Gonzaga

Bun v1.1.25: Now Running at 1.29 Million Requests per Second — I’m having a little fun with the title, but the latest version of the JavaScriptCore-based JS runtime has added node:cluster support and uses this to demo a high level of HTTP throughput on a ‘Hello World’ example. Support for V8’s C++ API has also landed – notable because Bun isn’t V8-based.

Ashcon Partovi

IN BRIEF:

We’ve mentioned ECMASCript 2024 a bit recently, but Pawel Grzybek has a neat and tidy overview of what’s new in the ES2024 spec.

🐝 Could Wasp be ‘the JavaScript answer to Django’ for full-stack webdev? The Wasp team certainly thinks so.

🎙️ Ryan Dahl, creator of both Node.js and Deno, went on the Stack Overflow podcast to talk about Deno’s current limitations and what’s coming in Deno 2.0.

RELEASES:

PlayCanvas Engine 2.0 – A powerful JS-based Web graphics platform.

Node v20.17.0 (LTS) – The LTS release of Node adds support for require-ing synchronous ESM graphs.

Astro 4.14 – The popular agnostic content site framework now includes an experimental API for managing site content.

pnpm 9.8, Vuetify 3.7, Neo.mjs 7.0

Join Us for ViteConf on October 3rd — Learn how the best teams are building the next generation of the web with Vite!

StackBlitz sponsor

📒 Articles & Tutorials

50 TypeScript F⁕⁕k Ups — An admittedly colorfully-titled book digging into lots of subtle mistakes you might run into with TypeScript. It’s available on Leanpub in PDF, iPad, and Kindle forms, or you can read it all directly on its GitHub repo. At least worth a skim in case you’re running into any of its points..

Azat Mardan

The Official Redux Essentials Tutorial, Redux — The long standing guide to how to use the popular Redux state container the right way with best practices has undergone a big reworking with TypeScript used throughout, new concepts added, and more coverage of RTK/React Toolkit features.

Redux Team

React is (Becoming) a Full-Stack Framework — Is React merely a frontend library? How does the backend fit in? The author shares his thoughts on what led him to start considering React as more of a full-stack solution.

Robin Wieruch

📄 Using JavaScript Generators to Visualize Algorithms Alexander G. Covic

📄 Optimizing SPA Load Times with Async Chunks Preloading Matteo Mazzarolo

📄 Using isolatedModules in Angular 18.2 Thompson and Lyding (Angular Team)

📄 How to Generate a PDF in a JavaScript App Colby Fayock

🛠 Code & Tools

Milkdown: Plugin-Driven WYSIWYG Markdown Editor Framework — A lightweight WYSIWYG Markdown editor based around a plugin system that enables a significant level of customization. It’s neat to see the docs are rendered by the editor itself. GitHub repo.

Mirone

Fuite 5.0: A Tool for Finding Memory Leaks in Web Apps — A CLI tool that you can point at a URL to analyze for memory leaks. Here’s how it works. There’s also a video tutorial.

Nolan Lawson

✂️ Cut Your QA Cycles Down to Minutes with Automated Testing — Are slow test cycles limiting your dev teams’ release velocity? QA Wolf provides high-volume, high-speed test coverage for web and mobile apps — reducing your test cycles to minutes. Learn more.

QA Wolf sponsor

LogTape: Simple Logging Library with Zero Dependencies — I’m digging this new style of library that promises support across all the main runtimes (Node, Deno, Bun) as well as edge functions and the browser devtools.

Hong Minhee

📊 Chart.js 4.4: Canvas-Based Charts for the Web — One of those libraries that feels like it’s been around forever but still looks fresh and gets good updates. Bar, line, area, bubble, pie, donut, scatter, and radar charts are all a piece of cake to render. Samples and GitHub repo.

Chart.js Contributors

Legend State: A Tiny, Fast and Modern React State System — A year ago, Jack Herrington wondered if Legend State could be ▶️ ‘the ultimate state manager’ and things have progressed a lot since, with it now boasting being the fastest React state library in town.

Jay Meistrich

Tagger: Zero Dependency, Vanilla JavaScript Tagging Library — You can play with a live demo here.

Jakub T. Jankiewicz

tinykeys 3.0: A Keybindings Library in ~650 Bytes — Keeps things as simple and sweet as possible.

Jamie Kyle

heic-to: Convert HEIC/HEIF Images to JPEG or PNG in the Browser

Hopper Gee

Cheerio 1.0 – HTML/XML manipulation library for Node.

🎨 Chroma.js 3.0 – JavaScript color manipulation library.

eta (η) 3.5 – Embedded JS template engine for Node, Deno, and browsers.

Embla Carousel 8.2 – Carousel library with fluid motion and good swipe precision.

d3-graphviz 5.6 – Graphviz DOT rendering and animated transitions.

Alpine AJAX 0.9 – Alpine.js plugin for building server-powered frontends.

Happy DOM 15.0 – JS implementation of a web browser sans UI.

Elliptic 6.5.7 – Elliptic curve cryptography in plain JS.

Poku 2.5 – Cross-platform JavaScript test runner.

💚 Use Node? Check out the latest issue of Node Weekly, our sibling email about all things relating to Node.js — from tutorials and screencasts to news and releases. We do include some Node related items here in JavaScript Weekly, but we save most of it for there.

→ Check out Node Weekly

#​700 — August 15, 2024

Read on the Web

👋 Wow, issue 700! We’re back after a week away. Technically I’m still on vacation, but I didn’t want to leave you in the lurch for too long.. 😉
__
Peter Cooper, your editor

JavaScript Weekly

ECMAScript Safe Assignment Operator Proposal — We often feature ECMAScript proposals that are in their later stages, but how about a brand new one you could get involved with? This one proposes an interesting additional bit of language syntax (?=) that returns a [error, value] tuple from an assignment.

Arthur Fiorette

Crafting a 13KB Game: The Story of Space Huggers — We always love Frank’s dives into how he produces neat JavaScript experiments and, in this case, a complete game in just 13KB — and if it inspires you, the latest js13kGames game development competition has just started.

Frank Force

WorkOS: The Modern Identity Platform for B2B SaaS — WorkOS is a modern identity platform for B2B SaaS, offering flexible and easy-to-use APIs to integrate SSO, SCIM, and RBAC in minutes instead of months. It’s trusted by hundreds of high-growth startups such as Perplexity, Vercel, Drata, and Webflow.

WorkOS sponsor

Google’s Angular Lead Sees Convergence in JavaScript Frameworks — “When picking a framework, don’t overthink it. It will end up being the same technology anyway with a different facade.” Minko Gechev talks about leading the way in converging Google’s Angular and Wiz frameworks.

Loraine Lawson (The New Stack)

Announcing Official Puppeteer Support for Firefox — As of version 23, Google’s originally Chrome-only Puppeteer browser automation library now has first-class support for Firefox too.

Mozilla Hacks

IN BRIEF:

⭐ If you’ve wondered why so many new npm packages are spam these days, it may be because of ‘Tea’. Though not the drinking kind..

Brendan Eich has expressed his support for the currently stage 1 Decimal draft proposal for bringing a more precise decimal number representation to JavaScript.

There’s an early technical preview of React Native WebGPU. William Candillon shows it off in ▶️ this 9-minute screencast.

RELEASES:

jQuery UI 1.14.0 – The legacy effects and widgets library reduces support for older browsers.

Madge 8.0 – Create graphs of module dependencies.

React Native 0.75, Angular 18.2, Bun 1.1.23, ESLint 9.9

📒 Articles & Tutorials

Patterns for Memory Efficient DOM Manipulation — Marc shares a solid look at the best practices to employ in order to avoid excess memory usage when managing/updating the DOM, all with a hope to make your apps faster. A good overview of the core principles behind DOM manipulation and optimization.

Marc Grabanski

‘How I Won $2,750 using JavaScript, AI, and a Can of WD-40’ — This is far from a technical JavaScript article, but it’s a fun story, involves some code and statistics, and ultimately might make you laugh.

Dave Kiss

Breakpoints and console.log Is the Past, Time Travel Is the Future — 15x faster JavaScript debugging than with breakpoints and console.log, supports Vitest, jest, node:test, and more. Huge changes are coming in Wallaby 2.0! Stay tuned. 🚀

Wallaby Team sponsor

Common Causes of Memory Leaks in JavaScript — Filled with basic examples oriented around V8-based runtimes like Node.js and Deno.

Trevor Indrek Lasn

Learn Web Components — If you’re looking to scrub on your Web Components know-how, this road map should prove useful. It’s a collection of good third party articles covering a wide range of knowledge.

Andrico Karoulla

A Tale of Evading JavaScript Anti-Debugging Techniques — When debugging code written by a third party, there could be some traps thrown in your way to prevent your usual debugging techniques. What to do? Revisiting a popular article from 2023.

Veritas

Fine-Grained Reactivity in Svelte 5 — Taking a close look at Svelte’s new so-called fine-grained reactivity.

Adam Rackis

📄 Tips for Using React Testing Library to Write Unit Tests Pavan Policherla

📄 45 VS Code Shortcuts for Boosting Your Productivity Shahed Nasser

🛠 Code & Tools

Volta 2.0: Install and Run JavaScript Tools Quickly — A long-standing Rust powered tool for installing and switching JavaScript related tools (like Node, TypeScript, Yarn, etc.) … “no matter the package manager, Node runtime, or OS.” GitHub repo.

Volta

Floating UI: Positioning for Tooltips, Popovers, Dropdowns, etc. — A library to create ‘floating’ elements such as tooltips, popovers, and dropdowns. Essentially a next-gen Popper which it now officially succeeds.

atomiks

😘 Kiss Bugs Goodbye — Get 80% automated E2E web and mobile app coverage in under four months with QA Wolf
. With QA cycles complete in minutes (not days), bugs don’t stand a chance. Schedule a demo.

QA Wolf sponsor

React Figma: Use Components as a Source for Figma Designs — A lot of folks use Figma to mock up designs for their React components, but what about the other way around? Use React components as a source for your designs in Figma! GitHub repo.

Ilya Lesik

Ky 1.6 – Simple HTTP client based upon Fetch for browsers, Node & Deno.

True Myth 8.0 – Safe, idiomatic null and error handling in TypeScript with Maybe and Result types.

Protobuf-ES 2.0 – Fully compliant Protobuf implementation for JS/TS.

🕹️ Kontra 10.0 – Lightweight gaming micro-library, optimized for js13kGames.

React Tooltip 5.28 – A tooltip component, surprisingly. (Demo.)

express-validator 7.2 – Express.js middleware for validator.js.

jscodeshift 17.0 – JavaScript codemod toolkit from Facebook.

🌍 Turf.js 7.1 – Modular geospatial analysis engine.

Marked 14.0 – Fast Markdown compiler / parser.

#​699 — August 1, 2024

Read on the Web

🏖️ Hi! Just a quick note to say that we’re taking next week off for a brief summer break. We’ll be back with our next issue on August 15.
__
Peter Cooper, your editor

JavaScript Weekly

How Google Handles JavaScript In Its Indexing Process — Once, if you wanted Google to index your content, it needed to be right in the HTML and not dynamically rendered with JavaScript. Things have changed, but how much? MERJ and Vercel analyzed over 100,000 Googlebot fetches in an attempt to empirically demystify Google’s approach.

Zecchini, Moore, Siddle, Ubl (Vercel)

Garbage Collection and Closures — When three JavaScript experts get together and all learn something new about how JavaScript works when they encounter a memory leak, it pays to listen. An interesting quirk to be aware of.

Jake Archibald

Tracing: Frontend Issues with Backend Solutions — As Developers, we often hear complaints like, “This page is taking too long to load. It’s a front-end issue. Fix it.” But what if the problem isn’t on the front end? How do you trace issues through your stack? Watch the step by step guide.

Sentry sponsor

Announcing TypeScript 5.6 Beta — The first beta of the next major version of TypeScript is out. Region-prioritized diagnostics (VS Code only, for now) is a particularly interesting addition.

Daniel Rosenwasser (Microsoft)

IN BRIEF:

Porffor is an experimental ahead-of-time JavaScript compiler/runtime that compiles to either WASM or native. Its developer has just gone full time on the project thanks to support from GitHub co-founder Chris Wanstrath.

React Conf 2024 has shared all the talks from its Las Vegas event back in May.

Ryan Dahl explains what Deno got wrong about HTTP imports and how it’s moving forward.

RELEASES:

Bun 1.1.21 – The JavaScriptCore-based server-side JavaScript runtime improves its Node.js and Remix compatibility.

Node.js v20.16.0 (LTS)

ESLint v9.8.0

📒 Articles & Tutorials

Benchmarking AWS Lambda Cold Starts Across JS Runtimes — It’s from the Deno team so it may not be surprising that Deno was fastest, but they share their methodology and results for Deno, Node, Bun and AWS’s managed Node runtime and they weren’t all that far apart.

Zinkovsky and Jiang (Deno)

Node.js’s Experimental Support for TypeScript — In this pull request, Node merged an experimental ability to transpile TypeScript into JavaScript, ultimately letting Node directly ‘run TypeScript’. No type checking is performed and, as Matt Pocock explains, TypeScript-only features are a no-go.

Sarah Gooding (Socket)

Ever Felt Compelled to Answer with Certainty When You Weren’t Sure? — Don’t stifle innovation with this toxic behavior. Thoughts on how to fix this—as a leader or individual contributor.

Test Double sponsor

A Different Way to Think About TypeScript — “a very expressive way to operate over sets, and using those sets to enforce strict compile time checks”

Robby Pruzan

📄 Reading from the Clipboard in JavaScript Raymond Camden

📄 Why Unknown Types Are Useful – TypeScript’s unknown, specifically. Michael Uloth

📄 Flexible Network Data Preloading in Large SPAs Matteo Mazzarolo

🔈 Why the Creator of jQuery Uses React and TypeScript Syntax․fm

📄 Highlights from Git 2.46 Taylor Blau (GitHub)

🛠 Code & Tools

emoji-picker-element: A Lightweight Emoji Picker — An emoji picking control, packaged as a Web Component. You can also add custom emoji to it. GitHub repo.

Nolan Lawson

STRICH: Fast and Reliable 1D/2D JS Barcode Scanning in Your Browser — You don’t need a native app to scan barcodes! Try the free demo app or sign up for the free, full-featured 30-day trial.

STRICH sponsor

☎︎ International Telephone Input — A very mature option that offers all the trimmings you’d expect: accessibility, type definitions, flags, automatic country selection, automatic formatting, and more. GitHub repo.

Jack O’Connor

PythonMonkey: Embed a JavaScript Engine into the Python VM — If you need to use Python but want to run JS, this gives you a way to do it with Mozilla’s SpiderMonkey engine. It now supports the CommonJS module system too.

Distributive Corp.

📅 Calendar Link: Dynamically Generate Event Links for Calendars — Generate event links for Google Calendar, Yahoo Calendar, Outlook, etc.

Anand Chowdhary

The Only Production-Ready AI-Powered Backend Code Generator — Build new services, extend your existing applications with Amplication AI. Go from idea to production in four minutes.

Amplication sponsor

JS-PyTorch: A PyTorch-Like Library for JavaScript — Recently renamed from JS-Torch, this brings some of the magic from Python’s popular PyTorch library to JavaScript for training and testing neural networks in particular. We linked to it earlier this year, but it has added GPU support thanks to GPU.js.

Eduardo Leao

json-to-csv-export: Generate Downloadable CSV of JSON Data — You’ve got some data in JSON, you want users to be able to download a CSV of that data.. GitHub repo.

Coston Perkins

React Virtuoso 4.8 – Complete React virtualized rendering list/table/grid family of components. Now with horizontal list support.

🎨 Chroma.js 2.6 – Simple color manpiulation library, now with tint and shade functions.

Ky 1.5 – Simple HTTP client based upon Fetch for browsers, Node & Deno.

YouTube.js 10.2 – Unofficial client for YouTube’s internal API.

tween.js 25.0 – JavaScript/TypeScript animation engine.

ArangoJS 9.0 – Driver for the ArangoDB graph database.

is-online 11.0 – Check if the Internet is reachable.

sql.js 1.11 – SQLite compiled to JavaScript.

🥳 And a bit of fun..

p5.js is a popular ‘creative coding’ library that takes a lot of inspiration from Processing. p5 makes it easy to create digital art and interactive experiences without a lot of boilerplate (check out how simple this ‘smoke particles’ demo is, for example).

p5.js v1.10.0 has just landed, but the reason I wanted to mention it is because of how much fun I’ve had throwing AI generated code at the online p5 editor, and if you have access to tools like ChatGPT, you can do it too.

For example, give ChatGPT a prompt like:

Write some p5.js code that renders the JavaScript “JS” logo.

Copy and paste the result into the editor, and:

It’s not perfect, but it’s pretty good for a first try (and easy to ‘fix’ by hand).

Different LLMs take totally different approaches. Consider what Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 gave me, for example:

Eeek..

Well, anyway, there’s a lot of fun to be had, and you can prompt LLMs to improve the results or customize things as you wish. Have some fun with it, it’s pretty cool what you can produce.

We’re taking a week off now, but will be back on August 15!