#702 — August 29, 2024
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.