#728 — March 21, 2025
JavaScript Weekly
Rsdoctor 1.0: An Analyzer for Rspack and Webpack — A one-stop, intelligent build analyzer making it easier to identify bottlenecks and optimize performance. It’s part of the same family of tools as Rspack (a Rust-powered web bundler) but is fully webpack compatible. If you’ve ever asked why your build times are too long, this is for you.
ByteDance Inc.
💡 In other Rust-powered JavaScript tooling news, the Oxlint JavaScript linter is now in beta. Imagine ESLint, but it runs in seconds on large codebases (indeed, it can process Microsoft’s VS Code repo in under a second).
Add Excel-like Spreadsheet Functionality to Your JavaScript Apps — SpreadJS is the industry-leading JavaScript spreadsheet for adding advanced spreadsheet features to your enterprise apps. Build finance, analysis, budget, and other apps. Excel I/O, 500+ calc functions, tables, charts, and more. View demos now.
SpreadJS from MESCIUS inc sponsor
📉 How We Made Our Rich Text Editor Load Faster — CKEditor is a long-standing, full featured GPL and commercially licensed rich text editor but its complexity can come with a performance cost. In this two part series (part two here), the CKEditor team digs into how they’ve recently significantly boosted its performance.
Szymon Cofalik (CKEditor)
Next.js vs TanStack — An incisive essay from a developer who’s had enough of the Next.js approach and has found solace in the approach offered by the increasingly capable TanStack collection of tools (as well as Vite).
Kyle Gill
IN BRIEF:
This automatically updated runtime compatibility table lets you see how/if different server-side JavaScript runtimes support different APIs.
💬 If you’d like to hang out on Discord and chat with other Node.js developers, there’s now an official Node.js Discord server.
The Node.js TSC has voted to stop distributing Corepack with future versions of Node. Corepack was originally introduced as a way to manage other package managers.
🛠️ Make Bookmarklets is a handy tool for turning JavaScript into bookmarklet code that you can use directly in a browser bookmark.
RELEASES:
Parcel v2.14.0 – The zero-config bundler adds a new CLI to scaffold apps, first-class MDX support, and beta support for React Server Components.
Ionic 8.5 – Cross-platform JS app development platform.
📊 Billboard.js 3.15.0 – D3-powered JS chart library.
📒 Articles & Tutorials
How to Build a Snake AI Game with Docker and TensorFlow.js — You’ve probably heard about people ‘vibe coding’ games by letting LLMs do the coding work, but what if you want to build a game yourself that has neural network powered elements? TensorFlow.js offers one solution that you could just as easily adapt to non-gaming contexts.
Manvar and Raina (Docker)
The Great ESLint v9 Migration Adventure: A Developer’s Survival Guide — “Let’s just say… I’ve seen things. I hit all the bumps, took all the wrong turns, and somehow made it to the other side—so you don’t have to.”
Yacine Kharoubi
🔒 Protect Against AI Bots, Fraud, and Abuse in Real Time — WorkOS Radar protects your app with advanced device fingerprinting — stop fake signups, free tier abuse, bot attacks and brute force attempts today.
WorkOS sponsor
React Trends in 2025 — Each year Robin does a post giving his opinion on what trends he sees arising over the next year. Last year, he put his money on Astro, RSCs, Vercel, and Biome – this year he points at React Server Components, shadcn/ui, TanStack Start, React Router, and more.
Robin Wieruch
Build a Custom RAG AI Agent with TypeScript and Jupyter — Deno, Ollama, and a few different AI models come together in this tutorial for storing document embeddings in a vector store and querying them for use in a basic agent.
Kitson Kelly
📄 Training AI to Uncover Malicious JavaScript Intent and Make the Web Safer Cejuela and Zheng (Cloudflare)
📄 Lazy Load Background Images with the IntersectionObserver API Anna Monus
📄 Web Components vs. Framework Components: What’s the Difference? Gabriel Shoyombo
📄 Detecting Browser Zoom Changes in JavaScript Kirupa Chinnathambi
📄 Making a Browser Based Game With Vanilla JS and CSS Eoin McGrath
📄 Deno Shows Us There’s a Better Way Mac Chaffee
🛠 Code & Tools
Introducing Motion for Vue — Motion is a popular and powerful animation library most commonly associated with React, but now there’s a new Vue flavor and it’s feature complete, too.
Matt Perry (Motion)
Reveal.js 5.2: The HTML Presentation Framework — Brings elegant presentations to anyone with a Web browser. v5.2 adds the ability to trigger ‘lightboxes’ where viewers can see images and videos in a way where they stand out more.
Hakim El Hattab
Introducing @clerk/agent-toolkit — Build agentic systems with support for user and organizational management. Compatible with Vercel’s AI SDK and LangChain.
Clerk sponsor
Konva: A JavaScript 2D Canvas Library — The native API for Canvas elements is pretty good, but Konva is a popular abstraction that sits on top and provides a more structured way to work with shapes, styling, events, animations, and more (lots of demos with code). It also has extra integration libraries for Vue, Svelte and React.
Konva
Typist 8.0: Tiptap-Based Rich Text Editor Component — Simple and opinionated. You can try several examples linked in the sidebar. Well suited for basic rich text situations like writing comments or messages and has a single-line mode. GitHub repo.
Doist
PeanoScript: TypeScript But It’s a Theorem Prover — An experimental proof assistant for Peano arithmetic based on TypeScript syntax.
mjgrzymek
Gridstack.js 11.5 – Build responsive interactive dashboards quickly.
Repomix 0.3 – Pack an entire repository into a single, AI-friendly file.
DOCX 9.3 – Generate .docx / Word files from JavaScript.
🖼️ Parvus 3.0 – Dependency-free image lightbox control.
BlockNote 0.26 – ‘Notion-style’ block-based editor.
🤖 wllama 2.3 – WebAssembly binding for llama.cpp.
Pixi.js 8.9 – Fast, flexible 2D WebGL renderer.
📰 Classifieds
🎹 STRICH: Add blazing fast and reliable 1D/2D Barcode Scanning to your web apps. Free demo app and 30-day trial available.
Meticulous automatically creates and maintains an E2E UI test suite with zero developer effort. Relied on by 1000s of orgs, including Dropbox, Lattice, Bilt Rewards and many more.
📊 Jspreadsheet – Lightweight JS data grid with Excel-like controls. Create rich web spreadsheets fast. Try it now.
📢 Elsewhere
A quick roundup of other interesting updates and useful resources from across the broader developer landscape:
John Tuckner took a look at the murky world of buying browser extensions for ‘fun and profit.’
If you’re using VS Code and GitHub Copilot, did you know you can ask Copilot about VS Code’s own features?
Ever wondered what’s involved in building a container image from scratch?
A look at building a Lisp interpreter in 66 lines of JavaScript.
“As an engineer, I’d rather be called stupid than stay silent.”