Category: News

We’re taking a few weeks off, but..

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#​652 — August 17, 2023

Read on the Web

🏝️ I’m taking two weeks off and will be back on Thursday, September 7. So if you don’t see the newsletter turn up for a while, it’s our fault 😉 As I’ve had to produce much of this issue a few days in advance, I’m mixing in some ‘golden oldies’ and popular items from earlier this year to keep things interesting, so this is a less newsy issue than usual. See you again in September! 👋
__
Peter Cooper, your editor

JavaScript Weekly

How Dropbox Reduced the Size of Its JavaScript Bundles by 33% — The folks at Dropbox realize that when you’re operating at scale, small annoyances and delays add up, and their web perf team narrowed down some of Dropbox’s perf issues to their module bundling process.

Nadeem and Hong (Dropbox)

htmx is Part of the GitHub Accelerator — htmx is a perfect example of a library that isn’t brand new, but one that becomes popular once the time is right. Its success is only continuing following acceptance into the first class of GitHub’s open-source Accelerator initiative, an opportunity that will enable the development of htmx 2.0. GitHub repo.

Big Sky Software

You Might Not Need a Framework — Maximiliano Firtman shares the vanilla approach in this video course on building rich web apps and sites without depending on libraries of frameworks. It covers the DOM, event handling, routing, web components, and more.

Frontend Masters sponsor

You Don’t (May Not) Need Lodash or Underscore — Inspired by the popular You Might Not Need jQuery, this extensive document provides pure JavaScript alternatives to almost 100 different functions as you’d find in popular utility libraries like Lodash.

You Don’t Need

⚡️ IN BRIEF:

It’s still a few weeks away, but we’re told “Bun 1.0 is almost here” and there’s 📅 a live presentation by Bun’s creator, Jarred Sumner, on September 7 you can sign up for now.

If you like to keep up with other languages than JavaScript, renowned C++ expert Herb Sutter recently ▶️ gave a fantastic talk about modernizing and improving C++ more quickly by creating a Typescript-esque superset with better abstractions and features.

🕹 React Jam was a React-oriented gamejam that took place last week and here are the winning games.

👾 Talking of gaming, the annual js13kGames JS coding competition has just started. You can join in the fun, though, as it doesn’t end till September 13.

Robin Wieruch shared his 10 Web development trends in 2023 back in January – how are they shaping up so far? As Larry David might say.. pretty, pretty good.

In “The “Skeleton Squad” is now targeting NPM“, the team at Socket take a look at how a group is attacking the npm package ecosystem.

🐦▶️ Playing with the earliest JavaScript in Netscape 2.0.

🎉 RELEASES:

Fresh 1.4
↳ The Deno-powered web framework.

jest-dom 6.0
↳ Custom matchers to test the state of the DOM.

NodeBB 3.3 – Node.js-powered forum software.

Electron 26.0

Angular 16.2

Playwright 1.37.0

📒 Articles & Tutorials

Discover three.js: A Complete Guide to Creating 3D Web Experiences — The breadth of the content on offer here had me looking for the price, but it’s all online and free. There’s a lot to dig through here if you want to get started (or just get better) at using three.js. If you’re already familiar with three.js, you may enjoy the three.js tips and tricks page.

Lewy Blue

JSX Without React — Exploring a new tool called NakedJSX that will allow you to render JSX without the need for the full React framework.

Chris Coyier

React Authentication — Without Complexity — Userfront streamlines authentication & access control so engineers can focus on their core business. Read the docs now.

Userfront sponsor

You’ve Got Options for Removing Event Listeners — Reviewing some of the most common approaches available to remove event listeners in JavaScript.

Alex MacArthur

Prepare Your Firefox Desktop Extension for the Upcoming Android Release — “Firefox will become the only major Android browser to support an open extension ecosystem.”

Scott DeVaney (Mozilla)

Application State Management with Angular Signals

Yevgeny / Oz

▶  Six (or so) New Approved and Proposed JavaScript APIs

Syntax Pocast podcast

The Importance of Verifying Webhook Signatures

Marcelo Oliveira (Snyk)

Writing JavaScript Without a Build System

Julia Evans

🛠 Code & Tools

Croner 7.0: Cron for JavaScript and TypeScript — Trigger functions upon the schedule of your choice using the classic cron syntax. Works in Node, Deno, Bun and the browser, across time zones, offers error handling and overrun protection, and more. There’s an live demo on JSFiddle. v7.0 adds support for specifying the n-th weekday.

Hexagon

Linkify 4.1: Link Up URLs, Email Addresses, and More in Plain Text — Given some plain text containing things like links and emails, Linkify will generate the correct code to display it on the Web. Not just URLs or emails, but hashtags, @mentions, IP addresses, and more – see the homepage for examples. GitHub repo.

Hypercontext

🦘JavaScript Scratchpad for VS Code: New Logpoints Feature! — Seeing runtime values has never been so easy. Simply place a breakpoint on a line, no debugger required: zero setup/configuration.

Wallaby.js sponsor

deno_python: Python Interpreter Bindings for Deno — A seamless Deno-Python integration via the Python/C API. The latest release supports installing and importing pip packages. This feature has been described as “slightly cursed” but it’s certainly interesting.

Denosaurs

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

Jakub T. Jankiewicz

Over 100 Algorithms and Data Structures Demonstrated in JS — Examples of many common algorithms (e.g. bit manipulation, Pascal’s triangle, Hamming distance) and data structures (e.g. linked lists, tries, graphs) with explanations. Available in other languages too like Chinese, Korean, French, and Spanish.

Oleksii Trekhleb et al.

Deliver Interactive Real-Time Live Streams with Amazon IVS

Amazon Web Services (AWS) sponsor

Proto Tree: A Way to Observe the JS Prototype Chain — Gal explains the motivation for this tool in 🐦 this Twitter thread.

Gal Weizman

Barba.js: For Smooth Visual Transitions Between Pages — You certainly can’t say the project’s homepage doesn’t show off all of its features. For such a dramatic set of effects, things feel smooth and surprisingly nice 😁 GitHub repo.

De Rosa, Michel, et al.

Stritch: A JavaScript Barcode Scanning Library — It’s a commercial library, but featureful and well presented with support for a variety of 1D and 2D barcode types.

Pixelverse LLC

#Script: A JS-Inspired Scripting Language for .NET — An embeddable scripting language mostly targeting template use cases. It can also be used in a Lisp style.

ServiceStack

💻 Jobs

Find JavaScript Jobs with Hired — Hired makes job hunting easy-instead of chasing recruiters, companies approach you with salary details up front. Create a free profile now.

Hired

🧑‍💻 Got a job listing to share? Here’s how.

ngraph.path: Path Finding Through Graphs — There’s a live demo if you want to see how it tackles the road network of several global cities.

Andrei Kashcha

SVGR 8.1
↳ Transform SVGs into React components.

BlockNote 0.9
↳ “Notion-style” block-based editor built atop Prosemirror. (Demo)

React Number Format 5.3
↳ Input formatter library for numbers.

Tinypool 0.8
↳ Minimal/tiny Node.js worker thread pool.

melonJS 15.9 – Lightweight HTML5 game engine.

Sortable 2.3 – Vanilla JS table sort. (Demo)

Preact 10.17.0

😭 Last week I promised a JavaScript AI/ML feature, but time hasn’t worked out in my favor (note to self: don’t send an issue while on vacation 😆). Keep your fingers crossed and it’ll be in one of the next issues. So much has been happening in the JavaScript AI/ML space that we want to shine a spotlight on it sooner than later.

👋 We’ll be back in three weeks on September 7, 2023. See you soon! If you have anything to submit for the next issue, hit reply and let us know (but appreciate we may be slow to reply since we’ll be on vacation 😉).

N|Solid v4.10.1 is now available

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NodeSource is excited to announce N|Solid v4.10.1 which contains the following changes:

General stability improvements and bug fixes
Node.js v16.20.2 (LTS): Includes a Node.js security release captured in Node.js v16.20.2 (LTS).
Node.js v18.17.1 (LTS): Includes a Node.js security release captured in Node.js v18.17.1 (LTS).

For detailed information on installing and using N|Solid, please refer to the N|Solid User Guide.

Changes

IMPORTANT: This release of N|Solid v4.10.1 contains a Node.js security release!

This release includes patches for these vulnerabilities:

• CVE-2023-32002: Policies can be bypassed via Module._load (High)

• CVE-2023-32006: Policies can be bypassed by module.constructor.createRequire (Medium)
• CVE-2023-32559: Policies can be bypassed via process.binding (Medium)
• OpenSSL Security Releases
OpenSSL security advisory 14th July.
penSSL security advisory 19th July.
OpenSSL security advisory 31st July

N|Solid

There are two available LTS Node.js versions for you to use with N|Solid, Node.js 16 Gallium and Node.js 18 Hydrogen.

N|Solid v4.10.1 Gallium ships with Node.js v16.20.2.

N|Solid v4.10.1 Hydrogen ships with Node.js v18.17.1.

Node.js

The Node.js 16 Gallium LTS release line will continue to be supported until September 11, 2023.

The Node.js 18 Hydrogen LTS release line will continue to be supported until April 30, 2025.

Supported Operating Systems for N|Solid Runtime and N|Solid Console

Please note that The N|Solid Runtime is supported on the following operating systems:

Windows:
Windows 10
Microsoft Windows Server 1909 Core
Microsoft Windows Server 2012
Microsoft Windows Server 2008
macOS:
macOS 10.11 and newer
RPM based 64-bit Linux distributions (x86_64):
Amazon Linux AMI release 2015.09 and newer
RHEL7 / CentOS 7 and newer
Fedora 32 and newer
DEB based 64-bit Linux distributions (x86_64, arm64 and armhf):
Ubuntu 16.04 and newer
Debian 9 (stretch) and newer
Alpine
Alpine 3.3 and newer

Download the latest version of N|Solid

You can download the latest version of N|Solid via http://accounts.nodesource.com or visit https://downloads.nodesource.com/ directly.

New to N|Solid?

If you’ve never tried N|Solid, this is a great time to do so. N|Solid is a fully compatible Node.js runtime that has been enhanced to address the needs of the Enterprise. N|Solid provides meaningful insights into the runtime process and the underlying systems. Click 👉 [HERE]

Svelte 5 is going to be radical

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#​651 — August 10, 2023

Read on the Web

JavaScript Weekly

My Experience Modernizing Packages to ESM — What a post! Mark, well known for his work on React, Redux, and much more, details the painful experiences and hard-earned lessons he picked up while migrating the Redux packages to ES modules.

Mark ‘acemarke’ Erikson

Things You Forgot (or Never Knew) Because of React — “I’ve written before about how React is the new default frontend framework, and how I don’t think most people using React on a regular basis realize quite how much it’s fallen behind.” High level thoughts about the React ‘bubble’ and some reasons to look beyond it, including a round up of some of the alternative options.

Josh Collinsworth

Build Web Apps in 60 Seconds with Dynaboard AI — Dynaboard’s low-code IDE offers 40+ built-in UI components. Quickly connect to REST & GraphQL APIs, SQL databases, and spreadsheets. Write custom code or use AI to generate any SQL, JS, or CSS.

Dynaboard sponsor

⚡️ IN BRIEF:

“Svelte 5 is going to be radical,” 🐦 tweets Rich Harris.

Server side JS runtime Deno 1.36 has been released with extended security options, a polyfill for node:test, completion of the node:os polyfill, and many other minor Node.js compatibility improvements.

Google has unveiled a sneak peek of a new IDE it’s developing called Project IDX. It has VS Code at its base but with strong JS framework support, simulators, and lot of ‘AI smarts’ on top, 🐦 says Addy Osmani.

A revived but early stage proposal for introducing observables to JavaScript. Your feedback is sought, so file an issue if you have any.

A fun walk through front-end history with a blog post containing every HTML element (well, almost – sorry applet).

Nim 2.0 has been released. Nim is a C++ and Python inspired, statically typed systems language, that supports being compiled to JavaScript.

🎉 RELEASES:

TypeScript 5.2 RC – TS 5.2 is nearly set for its final release. Explicit resource management with using is the headline feature, but there’s more, as usual.

esbuild 0.19.0 – The high-perf bundler can now import paths containing wildcards and supports advanced CSS @import rules. Note that this release contains backwards-incompatible changes.

Astro 2.10 – There’s also a first beta of Astro 3.

Node.js Security Releases – v20.5.1 (Current), v18.17.1 (LTS) and v16.20.2 (LTS) are all part of this set of releases including OpenSSL security updates and fixes, mostly, around permission policies.

📒 Articles & Tutorials

Bringing Sharp to WebAssembly and WebContainers — A look at how it’s possible to bring Sharp, a popular Node.js image manipulation module, into the browser. Welcome to the future.

Ingvar Stepanyan

A Compilation of Outstanding JS Testing Articles — An opinionated list of 10 outstanding testing articles, all with a JS slant to them. He also mentions his own list of JavaScript and Node.js Testing Best Practices which is worth revisiting too.

Yoni Goldberg

🚀 JavaScript Moves Fast—and So Should You. Let Us Help You Upgrade — React, Vue, Next, Node – our expert devs have it covered! Technical debt mounting? We’re your tech debt busters! 👊

Reduce Tech Debt. UpgradeJS now. sponsor

▶  A Look at HTMX: A ‘Game-Changing’ Alternative to React? — One of Jack’s typically well produced, short tours (just 14-minutes). He likes htmx and thinks it’s worth learning in order to have more options in your toolbox.

Jack Herrington

📝 Prefer a traditional writeup? James Hibbard has one here.

Node.js’s ‘Config Hell’ Problem — Andy ponders why a Next.js project has over 30 configuration files and what we can do to avoid it (unsurprisingly, it involves using Deno, but I enjoy the boldness).

Andy Jiang (Deno)

Creating a Screen + Camera Recorder with the Document Picture-in-Picture API — This is more powerful than I was expecting. You can basically record a screencast using browser APIs. In Chrome, at least.

Sébastien Jalliffier Verne

React Authentication — Without Complexity

Userfront sponsor

▶  Build and Deploy a Full Stack MERN Next.js 13 Threads Clone — An extensive, five hour screencast walking through the creation of a Threads/Twitter/X-style app using Next.js 13 and Clerk for user management.

Adrian Hajdin

▶  Turbopack vs Webpack — Being involved with the development of both bundlers, Tobias Koppers has some interesting things to say about the differences and explains why Turbopack is necessary.

Tobias Koppers and Jack Herrington

Autogenerating Rust-JS Bindings with UniFFI

Ben Dean-Kawamura (Mozilla)

Migrating My Blog from Gatsby to Astro

Artem Sapegin

🛠 Code & Tools

Fuite 3.0: A Tool for Finding Memory Leaks in Web Apps — A CLI tool that you can point at any URL to analyze for memory leaks. Introductory blog post here, and there’s also a video tutorial.

Nolan Lawson

Luxon 3.4: Date and Time Manipulation Library — If you’re familiar with Moment.js, it’s like that but with immutable objects, 1-indexed months, Intl-powered localization (so no locale or timezone files needed) and more.

Moment.js

JavaScript Frontend Error Monitoring 101 — Take a crash (pun intended) course on frontend error monitoring with Sentry. Read on.

Sentry sponsor

Filesize.js: Generate Human Readable Strings From File Sizes — For example, 123456 bytes could turn into “120.56 KB” – though different standards of conversion can also be used. GitHub repo.

Jason Mulligan

Typograms: A Way to Render ASCII Diagrams More Elegantly — An intriguing project where you ‘draw’ diagrams in plain ASCII text within special script tags and these get rendered into much nicer looking versions. An interesting approach if Mermaid is too full on for your needs.

Sam Goto / Google

💡 Talking of Mermaid, the latest release supports Sankey diagrams.

d3-graphviz 5.1: Graphviz DOT Rendering and Animated Transitions — Renders SVGs from DOT-defined graphs using a WebAssembly port of Graphviz, a popular graph visualization tool.

Magnus Jacobsson

🔊 Meyda: Audio Feature Extraction Library — Supports both offline feature extraction as well as real-time feature extraction using the Web Audio API. You can play with a demo right on the homepage.

Rawlinson, Segal, Fiala, Wray, et al.

💻 Jobs

Find JavaScript Jobs with Hired — Hired makes job hunting easy-instead of chasing recruiters, companies approach you with salary details up front. Create a free profile now.

Hired

Senior Software Engineer (Frontend Lead) — Lead Emerge’s web platform, used by teams like DoorDash, Square, & Airbnb (Our stack: Next.js, React, TS, Vercel).

🛸 Emerge Tools

🧑‍💻 Got a job listing to share? Here’s how.

ggml.js: Run ggml-Ported ML Models Directly in Your Browser — We’re going to do a feature on ML/AI related stuff in JS next week, so watch this space..

Rahul D Shetty

React Virtuoso 4.5 – Powerful virtual list component.

Perspective 2.4 – Fast, streaming real-time data visualization.

express-rate-limit 6.9 – Basic rate limiting for Express apps.

PLV8 3.2 – Use JS as a procedural language in PostgreSQL.

Puppeteer 21.0 – Headless Chrome automation in Node.js.

📊 Well, that’s handy..

npmgraph: A Fun Way to Visualize Package Dependency Graphs — A Web tool that accepts one or more package names (or a package.json) and renders a visualization of their (possibly intersecting) dependency graphs. Packages can be colored by various criteria (such as number of maintainers, if you want to see how fragile the world is) and you can download SVGs of the output.

Kieffer, Brigante, et al.

Serverless Observability in N|Solid for AWS Lambda

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We are excited to release Serverless Observability for N|Solid with support for AWS Lambda. With the growth of organizations leveraging serverless increasing as they realize the performance and cost benefits, we’re excited to provide customers with this new visibility into the health and performance of their Node.js apps utilizing Serverless Functions utilizing serverless architectures.

Img 1. Serverless Cloud Providers

Observability has become a critical part of software development; understanding performance issues and why they occur is incredibly valuable. Leveraging Serverless introduces challenges for observability based on how the technology works due to added complexity and challenges in data collection and analysis. Some key observability issues include:

Cold starts: When a serverless function is first invoked, it takes time for the underlying infrastructure to spin up. This can lead to latency issues, especially for applications that require a high degree of responsiveness. In other words, Lambda must initialize a new container to execute the code, and that initialization takes time.

Debugging: Debugging serverless applications can be challenging due to the event-driven nature of the platform. This is because it can be difficult to track the flow of execution through an application comprising multiple functions invoked in response to events.

Visibility: Serverless providers typically provide limited visibility into the underlying infrastructure. This can make it difficult to troubleshoot performance issues and identify security vulnerabilities.

N|Solid now makes it easy to implement distributed tracing based on __OpenTelemetry__, providing better insights into these microservices-based systems.

What is Serverless?

Serverless computing is a cloud computing model that allows developers to run code without provisioning or managing servers. Instead, developers pay for the resources they use, such as the time their code runs and the amount of data it stores.

Some key benefits of Serverless Computing include:

Accelerated app development,
Reduced costs and improved scalability,
Increased agility

Serverless computing has become increasingly popular in recent years, offering several advantages over traditional server-based architectures. However, serverless computing can also be complex, and observability, monitoring, and debugging can be particularly challenging.

Key concepts to understand the importance of extending observability to serverless architectures:

Observability: The ability to understand the state of a system by collecting and analyzing telemetry data. This data can include logs, metrics, and traces. Traces are a particularly important type of telemetry data, as they can be used to track the flow of requests through a system.

OpenTelemetry: An open-source observability framework that can collect and analyze telemetry data from various sources. It includes support for __Distributed Tracing__, which can be used to track the flow of requests through a serverless environment.

At NodeSource, we have been at the forefront of supporting developers to solve these challenges in their Node.js applications, so we have extended this series of features and content since last year:

Distributed Tracing Support in N|Solid – https://nsrc.io/DistributedTracingNS
Enhance Observability with Opentelemetry Tracing – Part 1 – https://nsrc.io/NodeJS_OTel1
Instrument your Node.js Applications with Open Source Tools – Part 2 – https://nsrc.io/NodeJS_OTel2
AIOps Observability: Going Beyond Traditional APM – https://nsrc.io/AIOpsNSolid

In a serverless environment, applications are typically composed of several different services, each responsible for a specific task. This can make it difficult to track the flow of requests through the system and identify performance problems, but not with N|Solid:

With this release, you can now have traces of when a microservices system calls a serverless function.

Now, with N|Solid, you can:

Track the flow of requests across your microservices architecture, from the Frontend to the Backend.
Identify performance bottlenecks and errors.
Correlate traces across multiple services.
Visualize your traces in a timeline graph.

N|Solid is a lightweight and performance-oriented tracing solution that can be used with any Node.js application. It is easy to install and configure, and it does not require any changes to your code.

Introducing Serverless Support for AWS Lambda

NodeSource has introduced a new observability feature to gather information throughout a request in a serverless environment. The collected information can be used for debugging latency issues, service monitoring, and more. This is valuable for users interested in debugging request latency in a serverless environment.

Img 2. N|Solid Serverless Installation Process

With this announcement, we are enabling the opportunity to connect a process following the indications of our Wizard. You will be able to connect the traces of your Node application through requests or connected functions, by connecting the data, you will be able to find the cause of latency issues, errors, and other problems in serverless environments.

How to apply Serverless Observability through N|Solid:

Key practices include leveraging distributed tracing to understand end-to-end request flows, instrumenting functions with custom metrics, analyzing logs for debugging and troubleshooting, and employing centralized observability platforms for comprehensive visibility.

Img 3. N|Solid Serverless Configuration

To use loading Opentelemetry Instrumentation Modules, first, use the NSOLID_INSTRUMENTATION environment variable to specify and load the Opentelemetry instrumentation modules you want to utilize within your application. To enable instrumentation for specific modules, follow these steps:

For HTTP requests using the http module, set the NSOLID_INSTRUMENTATION environment variable to http.

If you’re also performing PostgreSQL queries using the pg module, include it in the NSOLID_INSTRUMENTATION environment variable like this: http,pg.

List all the relevant instrumentation modules required for your application. This will enable the tracing and monitoring of the specified modules, providing valuable insights into their performance and behavior.

Connect through integration the serverless functions; select and configure the environment variable you require. For more advanced settings, visit our NodeSource documentation.

Img 4. N|Solid Wizard Installation Summary

In our NodeSource documentation, you will find CLI – Implementation and Instructions or directly follow the instructions of our Wizard:

Install
Usage
Interactive Shell
Inline Inputs
Interactive Inputs
Help
Uninstall

Benefits of N|Solid Implementing Serverless

Serverless monitoring collects and analyzes serverless application data to identify and fix performance problems. This can be done using a variety of tools and techniques, including:

__Metrics__: Metrics are data points that measure the performance of an application, such as the number of requests per second, the average response time, and the amount of memory used.
__Logs__: Logs are records of events in an application, such as errors, warnings, and informational messages.
__Traces__: Traces are records of a request’s path through an application, including the time it spends in each function.

By collecting and analyzing this data, serverless monitoring tools can identify performance problems, such as:

__Cold starts__: Cold starts is when a serverless function is invoked for the first time. This can cause a delay in the response time.
__Overcrowding__: Overcrowding occurs when too many requests are sent to a serverless function simultaneously. This can cause the function to slow down or crash.
__Bottlenecks__: Bottlenecks occur when a particular part of an application is slow. Some factors, such as inefficient code, a lack of resources, or a bug, can cause this.

Once a performance problem has been identified, serverless monitoring tools can help developers fix the problem. This can be done by:

Tuning the application: Developers can tune the application by changing the code, configuration, or resources used.
Evolving the application: Developers can evolve it by adding new features or changing how it works.
Monitoring the application: Developers can continue monitoring the application to ensure that the problem has been fixed and the application performs as expected.

Benefits of N|Solid Implementing Serverless

Img 5. N|Solid Functions Dashboard

Now, directly in your N|Solid Console, you’ll have the Function Dashboard, which will allow you to review in-depth and detail all the functions you have connected.

By selecting the functions, you can access the __Function Detail View__.

Img 6. N|Solid Function Detail View

In the first content block, you will have the following:

The function’s name and the provider’s icon__.
__Note: If you click on the function itself, it will open the function itself in a new tab directly in AWS.

On the other hand, in the central box, you will have:
– RUNTIME VERSION
– FUNCTION VERSION
– ACCOUNT ID
– N|Solid LAYER: (It is versioned, which is what allows us to see the AWS info)
– REGIONS: The zone of the function. Where it is running that specific version.
– ARCHITECTURE: Lambda can have several Linux architectures. This info comes directly from AWS.

And finally, on the right corner of our console, we will have
Vulnerability Status__, and below this, __Estimated Cost: How much are you spending on this function? For more information, please review our documentation.

About N|Solid Layer

In an __AWS Lambda__, you can have information about hundreds of instances, AWS does it for you, but you don’t have information on each invocation. They show you by default the last 5 minutes through the median, the 99th percentile, etc., but they can’t give us invocation by invocation individually; they simply group them.

There are two types of data we have from AWS Lambda:

Real-Time Metrics or Telemetry API Metrics
Cloudwatch Metrics

The metrics that CloudWatch reports are not real-time. They are extracted from the CloudWatch API by the Lambda Metrics Forwarder and displayed as AWS Lambda delivers them directly. This means there may be a delay of up to a few minutes between recording and displaying a metric.

The __Telemetry API Metrics__, which we extract, through Lambda layers, through modules that we install to your function to be executed.

We distributed this information as a layer,__N|Solid Layer__, injecting code inside. An AWS extension for N|Solid provides information about the life cycle of each Lambda function providing data to the console:

Generate the Timeline Graph
Span: Span Details, Path of the Span, and filter the results by attributes of the Span.
Changing Time Range
Generate SBOM reports

Our method tracks where the function is frozen to optimize Lambda resources within certain limits, allowing access to the information even after the function has been frozen.🤯In real-time, the registration is detected, providing the key information on each invocation in each instance.

In Closing,

We’ve been working on serverless observability for our customers for a while because we believe in the value of leveraging the technology approach. Serverless provides many benefits for developers and teams, but it can be difficult to provide quality observability without adding a lot of expensive overhead.

N|Solid can now help teams develop and maintain better software, resolve issues faster, and provide security for both traditional and serverless Node.js Applications. Try it for free, or connect with us to learn more.

It’s exciting to share this new release, our first in a series of serverless cloud platforms. Look for Azure and GCP to be released soon. Thanks for reading all about it.promising future ahead. Our heartfelt gratitude goes to our exceptional team for their unwavering dedication and hard work in bringing this vision to life.

Related Links

AWS Lambda Documentation – https://docs.aws.amazon.com/lambda/latest/dg/welcome.html
Layer Concept – https://docs.aws.amazon.com/lambda/latest/dg/gettingstarted-concepts.html#gettingstarted-concepts-layer
Cloudwatch Metrics – https://docs.aws.amazon.com/lambda/latest/dg/monitoring-metrics.html#monitoring-metrics-types
Lambda Extensions – https://docs.aws.amazon.com/lambda/latest/dg/lambda-extensions.html
CloudFlare Serverless Computing – https://www.cloudflare.com/learning/serverless/what-is-serverless/
IBM – What is serverless? – https://www.ibm.com/topics/serverless
GCP Serverless – https://cloud.google.com/serverless?hl=es-419

Taking JavaScript into Python

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#​650 — August 3, 2023

Read on the Web

JavaScript Weekly

A Tale of Evading JavaScript Anti-Debugging Techniques — When you’re poking arounddebugging code written and distributed by a third party, there might be some sneaky traps thrown in your path to prevent your usual techniques from working. What next? Disable breakpoints in DevTools? Use a proxy? What about.. recompiling your entire browser? 😆

Veritas

This reminds me of the guy who scraped pages by dumping heap snapshots from the browser – another fun post if you enjoy low level spelunking.

VanJS 1.0: A 1KB Reactive UI Framework Without React/JSX — VanJS is particularly light and elegant, and its author has put some serious effort into documenting it and offering tools to convert your HTML to its custom format. This week’s v1.0 release is a relatively big step forward for what is still a young project. GitHub repo.

Tao Xin

Add Excel-Like Spreadsheet Features to Your JavaScript Apps: SpreadJS — 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 GrapeCity sponsor

PythonMonkey: JavaScript/WASM Interop for Python — The alpha release of a new way to bring Python and JavaScript together, by way of embedding Mozilla SpiderMonkey into the Python VM. This post introduces the concept with some examples, an idea of where the project is headed, as well as some Colab demos. GitHub repo.

Will Pringle

dnt: A Tool to Publish a Hybrid npm Module for ESM and CommonJS — From the Deno team comes a tool that lets you write modules in JavaScript or TypeScript and then transforms them to support CommonJS, ESM, browsers, Deno, Node, and more.

Andy Jiang (Deno)

⚡️ IN BRIEF:

🎧 The popular Syntax.fm podcast has had a run of interesting episodes lately covering topics like the idea of ▶️ server-side JavaScript standards, ▶️ Rust for JavaScript developers, and ▶️ the role of polyfills.

A social engineering campaign that targets tech employees has been spreading through npm malware, claims Feross Aboukhadijeh of Socket.

Radix UI is now available in Vue thanks to Radix Vue.

Google has unveiled some big improvements to how the Google Maps JavaScript code can be loaded.

Firefox 116’s DevTools now support Custom Object formatters. This feature, long supported by Chrome, lets sites determine how certain types of object representation are formatted in the console and debugger.

The Svelte project has posted its latest monthly update. There’s a lot going on in the Svelte world right now.

Logging and Tracing Re-invented. Stop Sampling, Get Axiom —
“In the beginning there was stdout….” Get started for free, or get 1tb for $25/mo.

Axiom sponsor

🎉 RELEASES:

Backbone 1.5 – Yes. Really. And it’s still a thing of beauty.

Shoelace 2.6 – Popular suite of agnostic UI Web Components.

Prisma 5.1 – Next-gen Node.js + TypeScript ORM.

eslint-config-prettier 8.10 – Turn off ESLint rules that clash with Prettier.

📒 Articles & Tutorials

Understanding React Server Components — If you’ve struggled to get your head around the ideas involved, and Dan Abramov’s ‘let’s recreate RSCs from scratch’ went too deep, this is a good, high-level explanation of the fundamentals covering what problems RSCs solve, why you might use them, and how Next.js makes it all easier.

Alice Moore (Vercel)

Type vs Interface: Which Should You Use in 2023? — Learn the key differences between interfaces and type aliases in TypeScript, including their use cases and important features to consider.

Matt Pocock

How to Build a Multilanguage Website with Next.js & Storyblok

Storyblok sponsor

Speeding Up V8 Heap Snapshots — When diagnosing a memory leak in a JavaScript app, engineers at Bloomberg encountered some weird performance issues with capturing a single full-size heapshot taking more than 30 minutes(!) at times. Here’s the full story of how they investigated and resolved the problem.

José Dapena Paz (Igalia)

‘If Web Components Are So Great, Why Am I Not Using Them?’ — Do Web Components have a marketing problem? Dave thinks so, and shares what he thinks the issues are for this slowly-adopted technology.

Dave Rupert

▶  How to Build a Drag-and-Drop Kanban Board — A complete screencast walkthrough of using React to build a Trello-like app based around the familiar Kanban board pattern. It also serves as an introduction to the dnd-kit drag-and-drop toolkit.

Kliton Bare

An Introduction to Quicksort — A good, beginner friendly introduction to the Quicksort algorithm, concluding with a JavaScript implementation. (Beware the floating burger though..)

Kirupa Chinnathambi

Everything Mux Learnt Migrating 50K Lines of Code to React Server Components

Darius Cepulis (Mux)

▶  Refactoring an Angular App to Modern NgRx — NgRx is a reactive state management approach for Angular.

Marko Stanimirovic

🛠 Code & Tools

tsup 7.2: Bundle Your TypeScript Library with No Config — Throw your .js, .json, .mjs, .ts, and .tsx files at the esbuild-powered tsup and say hello to transpiled, bundled code for distribution. More in this tutorial.

egoist

Vite React Boilerplate: A Production Ready Starter Template — A new ‘batteries included’ Vite + React app template that leans upon, well, a lot of batteries from Zustand to Zod to Storybook.

Ricardo Valdovinos

Add Authorization, MFA, Biometrics and More to Your JavaScript App in Just Minutes — It’s about time that somebody talked some sense about OAuth and JavaScript. So we did. You’re welcome.

FusionAuth sponsor

Hackathon Starter 8.0: A Boilerplate for Node Web Apps — For when you might want to start building a Node app quickly (like at a hackathon, say) including key features like auth/OAuth, Bootstrap 5, account management, email forms..

Sahat Yalkabov

OGL 1.0: A Minimal WebGL Framework — WebGL is far from the easiest technology to use on its own, so libraries like Three.js are often used to make it more accessible. OGL has a similar motive to Three.js while remaining far closer to the WebGL metal.

Nathan Gordon et al.

💻 Jobs

Senior Software Engineer (Frontend Lead) — Come lead Emerge’s web platform, used by teams like DoorDash, Square, Dropbox & Airbnb (our stack: Next.js, React, TS, Vercel).

🛸 Emerge Tools

Find JavaScript Jobs with Hired — Hired makes job hunting easy-instead of chasing recruiters, companies approach you with salary details up front. Create a free profile now.

Hired

🧑‍💻 Got a job listing to share? Here’s how.

Size Limit 8.2: JavaScript Performance Budgeting Tool — Calculate the real ‘cost’ to run your JS app or lib and maintain an eye on performance and raise the alarm (in your CI system, say) when things go awry. Supports ES modules and tree shaking.

Andrey Sitnik

Stockfish.js 16 – The famous Stockfish chess engine in JS via WASM.

Marked 6.0 – Fast Markdown parser and compiler. Now rewritten in TypeScript.

eta (η) 3.1 – Embedded JS template engine. Now with Bun support.

Tremor 3.6 – React library for building dashboards.

Octokit.js 3.1 – ‘Batteries-included’ GitHub SDK.

React Image Gallery 1.3 – Image gallery carousel component.

YouTube.js 5.8 – Library to use YouTube’s private API.

🐴 Let’s hit the Oregon Trail

The Oregon Trail was a 2000+ mile wagon route used by traders and migrants headed west in the early days of the United States. It was also a hugely popular computer game that, more often than not, ended in disaster for the virtual settlers whose lives you directed.

Particularly popular on the Apple II and early Macs, you can give the game a spin via the following project:

Macintosh.js: A Virtual Macintosh Running via Electron — An impressive virtual machine emulating a 1991 Macintosh Quadra 900 with System 8, all running in Electron. We linked to this several years ago but it’s had some updates since then and runs faster than before. As well as a few games, such as Oregon Trail, there are a variety of apps pre-installed, including a trial of Adobe Photoshop 3 which starts up faster than my real Photoshop now.. (Download necessary since it’s an Electron app and all..)

Felix Rieseberg, Apple, et al.

Name mangling

Posted on by

#​649 — July 27, 2023

Read on the Web

JavaScript Weekly

Hono + Htmx + Cloudflare: A New Stack? — A lot of people seem to be jumping on htmx lately as an alternative to the complexity of frameworks like React, but what if you want to keep using JSX? Hono is a (vaguely Express-like) Web framework targeting edge function use cases and includes middleware for rendering JSX. Yusuke gives a quick example of how all this can come together with Cloudflare Workers and D1 for a simpler, full-stack JS experience.

Yusuke Wada

Shrinking VS Code with Name Mangling — There’s a fair bit of JavaScript in VS Code but the team has managed to reduce the size of the shipped code by almost 4MB without actually doing any deleting or refactoring thanks to a new ‘name mangling’ build step. This is a great read on how the team approached things and got it working.

Matt Bierner

New Course: The Hard Parts of UI Development — Develop an under-the-hood knowledge of UI development by learning techniques such as data binding, UI composition, templating, virtual DOM and its reconciliation, and hooks, all from scratch!

Frontend Masters sponsor

Microsoft TypeChat: An Approach for Type-Safe LLM Responses — A new project with some prominent names attached (the designer of C# and PM for TypeScript, for starters) that demonstrates the excitement within MS for large language models (LLMs). TypeChat aims to work around the problem of LLMs outputting hard-to-parse natural language and to direct such output into a predictable, typed form.

Hejlsberg, Lucco, Rosenwasser et al.

⚡️ IN BRIEF:

🐦 React/Redux’s Dan Abramov is leaving Meta. Having achieved so much and reaching a point where he feels ready to move on, Dan is departing Meta but will remain on the React team as an independent third party. 💙

📘 The Concise TypeScript Book is, unsurprisingly, a guide to using TypeScript. More surprisingly, it’s all on GitHub and free to read. Hurrah.

Tixy is an interactive page for learning logic, math and expressions by solving puzzles using a visual grid. It starts off very simply, but gets elaborate quickly. This is a neat way to pick up some of the skills needed for Dwitter.

JSPlayground is a new Web-based JavaScript sandbox tool.

Is the term ‘Jamstack’ finished? Brian Rinaldi wonders.

🎉 RELEASES:

Bun 0.7 – The JavaScriptCore-based alternative JS runtime adds (experimental) Vite support, Web Workers support, and includes a –smol option to run in memory constrained environments (with a significant memory reduction shown off in the post).

Astro 2.9 – The ‘zero JS by default’ framework adds experimental support for view transitions and more.

Neutralinojs v4.13.0 – Lightweight cross-platform desktop app framework.

Remix 1.19 – Modern full-stack JS framework.

Node.js v20.5.0 (Current)

📒 Articles & Tutorials

💛  ‘Good Code is Like a Love Letter to The Next Developer Who Will Maintain It’ — “The beauty of our creations, however, is not judged solely by the elegance of our algorithms or the efficiency of our code, but by the joy and ease with which others can build upon our work.”

Addy Osmani

More practically, Addy also tells us to stick to ‘boring architecture’ for as long as possible.

📅  React Native EU Conf with Guenther Steiner: Book Last Regular Tickets

Callstack sponsor

How to Build a GPT-3 App with Next.js, React, and GitHub Copilot — GitHub doesn’t often run tutorials on its blog, but they appear keen to promote the idea of a modern Copilot-oriented development process, and this certainly shows off some of the potential.

Kedasha Kerr (GitHub)

Upgrading an Ancient React App

Jeffrey Carl Faden

🛠 Code & Tools

a11y-dialog 8.0: A Lightweight, Accessible Way to Create Dialogs — Supports alert dialogs as per WAI-ARIA, nested dialogs, and provides both a DOM and JavaScript API. There’s a live CodeSandbox demo you can play with. v8.0 no longer supports IE, if that’s important to you.

Kitty Giraudel

Mapkick.js: Interactive Maps in One Line of JavaScript — Supports Mapbox and MapLibre. It also comes in Python and Ruby variants targeting server-side rendered use cases.

Andrew Kane

RxDB – Local Database For JavaScript Applications — With RxDB you can build realtime applications with great performance that even works when your users are offline.

RxDB sponsor

PLJS: JavaScript Language Plugin for Postgres — PLV8 is the ‘go to’ extension to use JavaScript within Postgres, but this QuickJS-based variant, from the same creator, is more compact, easier to maintain, and may be enough for your needs.

Jerry Sievert

Twin 3.4: Use Tailwind Classes in CSS-in-JS Libraries — Twin v3 introduced full Tailwind plugin support, and v3.4 adds a new SolidJS preset as well as styled-components 6 support.

Ben Rogerson

Praxis: An iOS Browser That Blocks JavaScript — Well, that’s certainly one way to fight back against prompts, modals, and battery sapping scripts, but it won’t work with every site..

Arnold Sakhnov

Spectacle 10: A React and JSX-Based Presentation Library — Got a presentation coming up? Build your decks with JSX, perhaps. GitHub repo.

Formidable

💻 Jobs

Senior Software Engineer (Frontend Lead) — Come lead Emerge’s web platform, used by teams like DoorDash, Square, Dropbox & Airbnb (our stack: Next.js, React, TS, Vercel).

🛸 Emerge Tools

Find JavaScript Jobs with Hired — Hired makes job hunting easy-instead of chasing recruiters, companies approach you with salary details up front. Create a free profile now.

Hired

🧑‍💻 Got a job listing to share? Here’s how.

gridstack.js 8.4
↳ Framework agnostic dashboard layout and creation.

amqp-client.js 3.0
↳ AMQP 0-9-1 client for both Node and browser (via WebSocket).

FingerprintJS 4.0
↳ Browser fingerprinting library. No longer open source.

MQTT.js 5.0 – MQTT client for Node and browser.

🙈 Taking things too far..

We’ll support anyone who’s keen to reduce the amount of needless JavaScript that goes over the wire (👋 Astro or Qwik) but sometimes, just sometimes, you can go too far with the endeavor to almost comedic effect:

😱  Implementing Tic Tac Toe with 170MB of HTML — Unsurprisingly, the demo (which we’ve not linked to here) brought my browser to a crashing halt, but it’s fun to see a developer take on the challenge of using Chrome’s support for popovers and the state of said popovers along with a huge pile of HTML to handle a game of Tic Tac Toe. Don’t repeat this in production, folks..

Gareth Heyes

Empowering Startups: Building Better, More Secure Apps and Ensuring Exceptional CX with N|Solid

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Startups face numerous challenges on their path to success, and two key aspects that significantly impact their growth are code quality and user experience. In today’s fast-paced technological landscape, startups must prioritize these areas to build robust, scalable, and secure applications. This is where N|Solid can be a dynamic solution by providing powerful telemetry, insights, and security alerts for Node.js apps. This post will explore leveraging N|Solid effectively, a game-changer for startups, saving critical time and resources while serving customers with the best experience.

We recently participated in Collision Conf in Toronto, where we met hundreds of startups who shared their bold ideas and solutions with the world. It’s why we wanted to put out this post, as we were asked over and over again about how we could help them save time, solve issues with their apps and level up their security.

Startups are often focused on speed to market, meaning a lot of effort goes into delivering features to match the market needs they seek to meet. Teams can be limited in terms of the level of testing rigor and tooling that focuses on quality vs. completion. It can be a central component of an MVP strategy, but there are risks with this approach, notably with application performance and user experience. We have helped many startups elevate their approach by adding N|Solid into their development workflow.

N|Solid is an AI-enabled APM (monitoring and management platform) and Security platform explicitly designed for Node.js applications. It offers various features that empower startups to optimize code performance, identify and troubleshoot issues, and deliver exceptional user experiences. With real-time insights and actionable data, N|Solid Console equips startups with the tools to make informed decisions and drive continuous improvement.

“If you are using Node for anything important for your business, you should take a long, hard look at N|Solid” – Russ Whitman, CEO NodeSource

N|Solid offers powerful debugging capabilities that enable developers to identify and rectify bottlenecks in production. With its built-in CPU profiling and heap snapshots, startups can quickly pinpoint performance hotspots and memory leaks, ensuring their applications run smoothly, even under high loads. By continuously monitoring performance metrics, startups can optimize their codebase, leading to faster and more responsive applications. They can also easily monitor and manage multiple instances of their applications, ensuring efficient load distribution and maximizing system resources.

Understanding the Importance of Code Quality

High-quality code forms the baseline of reliable, scalable, and maintainable applications. Code quality matters significantly, particularly for startups, as it empowers them to have control over critical variables. Code quality also plays a vital role in the success of startups by providing a solid foundation for reliable, scalable, and maintainable applications that their users love.

Poor code quality is very expensive. Performance issues can cost more than frustrated users; they add needless cloud spend and take the dev team away from feature development, trying to solve issues that are sometimes impossible to replicate in a dev or test environment. We have learned that teams often spend weeks, or even months, chasing bugs we could identify in minutes with N|Solid. That cost for a startup can be deadly.

We recommend that all developers and DevOps add monitoring tooling into their development process because we see the positive impact of these solutions daily. There are many options, but if you are using Node.js, N|Ssolid is the tool you should be using. Other APM’s are great at providing a view into a range of technologies, but they can lack the depth of insights needed to pinpoint issues, especially with Node. Other APM’s monitor Node apps through instrumentation, and to gather metrics, they interrupt the event loop (killing performance). N|Solid doesn’t require instrumentation and doesn’t break the event loop. More importantly, it gathers the data other solutions don’t (like visibility into worker threads).

Node is one of the most-loved technologies by developers because it’s easy to wield; you can get up to speed quickly and build applications fast. But it’s also relatively easy to build something in Node.js that has issues, especially the more complex the application is. Our Node experts have been helping developers access and leverage Node.js for nearly a decade – there is simply no better tool for Node.js than N|Solid. If your Startup uses Node, consider trying N|Solid. You can get started with a Free account __HERE__ and be up and running in no time; plus, we have special pricing for startups through September 2023 at half off!.

It’s True! We Love Startups! So Startups Get a 50% Discount!

As noted above, we have created a discount program for Startups! Get the Best Solution to Monitor & Secure Your Node Apps at Special Startup Pricing – FOR HALF OFF. To apply for this benefit, click HERE

Enhancing Security Oversight, Overnight!

Another great opportunity startups have when incorporating N|Solid into their architecture is the control and oversight of their security that they gain by integrating NCM (Node Certified Modules) in N|Solid Console and within our NCM GitHub App as a standard part of the development process. It’s a simple and easy way to immediately add visibility into potential security risks of your Node.js apps.

Node.js (like all open-source projects and software in general) can experience security flaws; there, are new CVE’s popping up all the time. With N|Solid and our GitHub app, Startups can understand security issues from development through production, with key insights to help understand security issues and how to resolve them.

Some of the key benefits that NCM – NodeSource brings are:

Vulnerability Mitigation: By proactively identifying vulnerabilities, developers can quickly apply patches or choose alternative packages, ensuring their applications remain secure.

License Compliance: This feature is particularly important for organizations with strict compliance requirements or who rely heavily on open-source software.

Report Generation: These reports provide valuable insights into the security and compliance status of Node.js applications, helping developers make informed decisions and take necessary actions.

Integration with GitHub: This integration simplifies the management of open-source Node packages within GitHub deployments, providing an additional layer of security and ensuring compliance during the development and deployment processes.

By leveraging the powerful features of GitHub NCM – NodeSource, developers can significantly enhance the security, compliance, and overall reliability of their Node.js applications.

The Future of Software Development, Powered by Telemetry, Security, and AI!

At Collision, the fast-growing tech conference that gathers industry leaders, innovators, and disruptors; we shared a big announcement about the future of Node! We announced our AI Assistant, Adrian, incorporated into N|Solid Console at Collision, revolutionizing intelligent monitoring and optimization for Node.js apps. This is pretty cool; read,on!

Supercharge Your Startup with AI Assistant, Adrian & N|Solid Console

Adrian is an advanced, AI-powered Assistant that provides actionable insights and suggestions, bringing context to your data. Imagine an AI chat assistant that lets you ask questions about the data and gives recommendations about how to solve issues them. It’s like “god mode” for Node. Enabling teams to streamline their Node.js applications, reduce downtime, cut costs, and enhance overall user satisfaction faster than ever.

Our AI Assistant, Adrian, leverages the power of AI to deliver a range of features that empower developers and teams to optimize their Node.js applications effectively. Let’s explore some of the key features of AI Assistant, Adrian:

Automated Metric Collection: AI Assistant, Adrian, automates the collection of essential performance metrics from Node.js applications. It provides real-time insights into critical areas such as event loop delays, CPU utilization, memory usage, and more.

Node Performance Enhancer: AI Assistant, Adrian, suggests optimizations to enhance the performance of Node.js applications.

Intelligent CPU Profiling: AI Assistant, Adrian, helps developers identify and resolve performance hotspots using smart CPU profiling.

Cost Calculator: AI Assistant, Adrian, includes a cost calculator that helps teams estimate the cost implications of their Node.js applications.

Code Advisor: AI Assistant, Adrian, is a knowledgeable advisor, providing recommendations and suggestions to improve code quality, maintainability, and scalability. It assists developers in adhering to coding best practices, ensuring clean and efficient code that is easier to maintain and scale over time.

Sign up HERE to join the private beta list and experience AI Assistant Adrian’s transformative capabilities in optimizing your Node.js applications. The combination of NodeSource’s N|Solid Console’s and the advanced AI capabilities of Adrian Assistant offers developers a powerful toolkit for optimizing their Node.js applications.

Conclusion

With N|Solid Console’s advanced insights and powerful features, startups can elevate their development processes, enhance application performance, and ensure unparalleled user experiences – saving critical time and cost.

The future of N|Solid is powered by AI and our Assistant, Adrian.

Let’s come together, connect, and propel the future of technology forward!

About NodeSource, Inc.

NodeSource, Inc. is a technology company completely focused on Node.js and is dedicated to helping organizations and developers leverage the power of this technology. We offer the leading APM for monitoring and securing Node.js and provide world-class support and consulting services to help organizations navigate their Node.js journey. __#KnowYourNode__.

For more information, Sign Up HERE to try N|Solid Console’s or visit NodeSource.com for more details and follow @NodeSource on Twitter.

The tale of how static typing came to JavaScript

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#​648 — July 20, 2023

Read on the Web

JavaScript Weekly

pkg-size: Find the True, Current Size of an npm Package Without Leaving Your Browser — A beautifully designed site that can show you the true size of an npm package (including dependencies) using the actual packages which are ‘installed’ in a browser-based WebContainers-powered environment. Hiroki has 🐦 a Twitter thread where he explains more about how it works.

Hiroki Osame

TypeScript and the Dawn of Gradual Types — From GitHub’s ReadME project comes a thorough journalistic take on how static typing made it into the JavaScript world, what TypeScript offers, some alternative approaches, and the possibility of adding type annotations to JavaScript iself.

Mike Melanson (GitHub)

Create a Real-Time Multi-Host Livestream with Amazon IVS — Amazon Interactive Video Service (Amazon IVS) enables developers to create dynamic video experiences, such as collaborative livestreams with multiple hosts. Click here to learn more.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) sponsor

Storybook 7.1: The Workshop for Building UI Components — v7.1 introduces in-app onboarding for your newest team members, zero-config styling support for Tailwind, MUI, styled-components and MUI, Vue 3 source snippets, and more.

Storybook Team

Five Inconvenient Truths about TypeScript — A brief dose of reality for a world seemingly obsessed with TypeScript: “If you want to get into TypeScript, don’t think you can leave JavaScript behind. It will find you, and it will get you.”

Stefan Baumgartner

🎉 RELEASES:

Fresh 1.3 – The Deno web framework. Plugins can now inject routes and middleware into apps, there’s Deno.serve support, and you can create async route components.

Downshift 8.0 – Primitives to build WAI-ARIA compliant React autocomplete, combobox & select components.

Node.js v18.17.0 (LTS) – Node 18 gets the Ada 2.0 WHATWG URL parser.

Fastify 4.20 – The fast, low overhead web Node.js framework.

⚡️ IN BRIEF:

The Promise.withResolvers proposal has progressed from stage 2 to 3 at TC39, as has the array grouping proposal, as well as source phase imports.

🗣 The folks on Hacker News discussed why the site isn’t being indundated with links to new JavaScript frameworks recently. Has React ‘won’? Has AI stolen the limelight? Or is a JavaScript revolution quietly brewing..?

👴🏻 A blog post from 1996 popped up telling us about the newest JavaScript features in Netscape 3.0 – definitely a blast from the past. Say hello to the typeof operator!

📒 Articles & Tutorials

‘How We Generate JS and Python SDKs from a Canonical Rust SDK’ — PostgresML is an extension that adds machine learning functions into Postgres. Its team loves and prefers Rust but most of its users are using JavaScript or Python. What to do? Simultaneously write multi-language libraries using Rust..

Silas Marvin (PostgresML)

💡 Psst.. if you use Postgres at all, we have a Postgres newsletter too!

Updating Code with jscodeshift — TypeORM is an ORM for Node that introduced some breaking changes requiring the author to update lots of calls in his code. A perfect time to use a ‘codemod’ to automate the job. Even if you don’t use TypeORM, this post might give you some ideas for other places to use such an approach.

Clinton Blackburn

AI-Proofing Your Career For Tomorrow: Free Session by Interview Kickstart — Discover Your AI Career Path (AI/ML vs Data Science). Take an informed decision: Insights from FAANG+ AI/ML Engineers. Register for a free session.

Interview Kickstart sponsor

How React 18 Improves App Performance — If you’ve not entirely kept up with how things have changed or developed in React with regards to concurrent rendering, transitions, Suspense, and even React Server Components, this is a fantastic review and primer to get up to speed on how React’s newer features dramatically help with performance.

Lydia Hallie (Vercel)

300ms Faster: Measures Taken to Reduce Wikipedia’s Total Blocking Time (TBT)

Nicholas Ray

On the Origins of JSX and Why It Exists

Hristiyan Dodov

🛠 Code & Tools

wavesurfer.js 7: Audio Waveform Player — If you’re creating a podcast player, audio experience, or anything where seeing an interactive audio waveform could be useful, check this out. GitHub repo.

katspaugh and contributors

TOAST UI Grid: A Customizable Grid Control for the Web — A powerful MIT-licensed grid-style control for the display, editing, and management of data. It comes from the same folks as TUI Editor and TUI Calendar and while it’s happy on its own, there are wrappers for Vue and React too. GitHub repo.

NHN

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, karma, jasmine, and more.

Wallaby.js sponsor

Pines: A Library of UI Components for Alpine.js and Tailwind Projects — Includes sliders, tooltips, accordions, modals, and others. The CSS-only components are usable in any Tailwind project while the ones that require JS are designed for use with Alpine.js.

devdojo

YouTube.js 5.5: A Wrapper Around YouTube’s Private API — One of those things you’d expect to be quickly blocked somehow, but it’s 18 months old, so… 😆 The fun isn’t just for Node or Deno users – it’ll work in the browser if you can proxy the requests through your own server.

LuanRT

Eruda 3.0: A Console for Mobile Browsers — If you’re in a situation where you have no access to DevTools, you can add Eruda to your page and it provides a sort of virtual devtools you can use from any browser, including on mobile.

LiriLiri

Reagraph 4.10: WebGL Graph Visualization Library for React — Here’s a basic code example. This week’s release adds support for three dimensional clustering. GitHub repo.

REAGRAPH

brotli-wasm 2.0: A Brotli Compressor and Decompressor — Covers both Node and the browser by means of WebAssembly.

HTTP Toolkit

Pacquet: A New, Experimental Package Manager for Node — From a Node.js core member, no less.

Yagiz Nizipli

Shareon 2.2
↳ Lightweight, stylish ‘share’ buttons for social networks.

Helipopper 8.0
↳ Tooltips and popovers for Angular. (Demos.)

Ink 4.3
↳ React for interactive command-line apps.

📅 React Calendar 4.4

♖ React Chessboard 4.0

💻 Jobs

Find JavaScript Jobs with Hired — Hired makes job hunting easy-instead of chasing recruiters, companies approach you with salary details up front. Create a free profile now.

Hired

🧑‍💻 Got a job listing to share? Here’s how.

🎵 Thank you for the music..

Chip Player JS: Browser-Based MIDIs, MODs and Game Music — The creator of this site has, like me, a fascination with old digital music – MIDI files, trackers, and the like. Rather than keep an old computer running, he decided to build a browser based music player for such files.

Matt Montag

P.S. If you’re looking for something specific to listen to, the music by famed Norwegian tracker Jogeir Liljedahl is well worth a try – particularly Overture or Guitar Slinger. Or how about Donkey Kong Country’s dreamy Aquatic Ambience? It’s striking how trackers managed to squeeze so much down into a few hundred kilobytes by the heavy reuse and manipulation of samples.

Welcome to The Future of Software Development: Powered by Telemetry, Security, and AI

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We made some big announcements during our keynote at Collision in Toronto; our AI Assistant, Adrian, and the open sourcing of our Node.js Runtime, N|Solid Runtime. They are a big part of our vision for the future of software development, one that is powered by telemetry, security, and AI – which was the topic of our talk. In this post we will share more about our vision and specifically how NodeSource is enabling that future.

NodeSource began as most great companies do; with smart, passionate people that saw a problem they had to fix: there was simply no good tooling for Node.js. We were Node believers and open-source project contributors on a mission to make Node more accessible for developers & safe for enterprises to adopt. Since our beginning we have provided the ecosystem with our insights, training, and binary distributions of the open-source packages – over 110 million downloads in the last year alone – powering Node applications in production all over the globe.

As a result of countless hours of ideating, coding and customer validation, N|Solid was born – an enterprise grade tool providing the deepest insights with the lowest overhead, all while continuing to keep ode apps secure. Today N|Solid is used by some of the largest organizations and developers globally. The mission that was set all those years ago is now more relevant than ever, over 30 million websites rely on Node.js and it’s one of the most used and loved technologies by developers worldwide. It’s been an amazing journey.

Revolutionizing Software Development: Advancing Telemetry, Security, and Efficiency with AI Innovation

We have continued to innovate, with our Node experts pushing to create the most advanced telemetry and security platform possible while still providing customers with world class support for Node. We have always believed that giving the very foremost data and insights was the best way to produce better software. Making software is continually challenging; the software development life cycle (SDLC) is highly inefficient.

You begin with an idea that you turn into code, then it gets built, tested and released for users to experience. Then you monitor for issues that are identified to triage and solve. Those fixes are added to other features to build, test, and release…and the cycle continues. While significant effort has been applied to make this process more efficient, these have invariably been small improvements. Tweaks really, to the overall process. Until now, fueled by the advancements in AI.

We believe that the future of software is intelligent software engineering, powered by telemetry, security & AI. The SDLC is augmented by applying AI that is trained with the right data to accelerate the production and maintenance of secure, highly performant code. It’s about building a new model – a generative loop based upon the intent of the code and its actual operation in production – bringing data and AI into the process in powerful new ways.

On the front end, AI is redefining the way code is written, from ChatGPT to GitHub’s CoPilot and beyond, Generative AI is creating code, documenting it, and writing test plans. These advancements are set to revolutionize the software development process on their own, replacing the often used copy/paste of code found from Google, StackOverflow, or existing codebases. Developers that leverage these new tools will have dynamically increased velocity of their code while still owning the solution. While significant, this is only a part of the solution of the future.

Unveiling the True Measure of Software: Quality and Performance in Production

The reality is that the quality and performance of software is only realized once it is in production, in use by real users. The telemetry data in this application is a key component for transforming the SDLC. How software performs in production, not how well software did in a test environment, is the true test for quality code. And the depth of that telemetry data is how you identify issues. This has long been our focus, not just to report on general metrics, but to go well beyond. This is why we established the measure of event loop utilization, worker thread monitoring, and more, to enable deep insights into application health and performance.

Application health is directly tied to security, more than ever today quality code is secure code. But, security is not static, there are new vulnerabilities that develop all the time. The visibility to these is critical, especially for production code. It’s why we offer our security tooling, NCM (Node Certified Modules) as a part of our platform. Enabling customers to have visibility to security issues from development and production live code.

It’s the depth of data and security health that unlock the opportunities with AI. It’s the other half of the equation of the future of software, powered by telemetry, security and AI. This is the future NodeSource is enabling.

N|Solid – the future of Node bringing the power of data and AI

With the announcement of our AI Assistant, “Adrian”, we are leveraging our unique and unparalleled data to help developers identify and resolve issues with tremendous speed and efficiency. Adrian will help every Node developer and devops engineer to not just view the telemetry, security, and alerts that matter – but to understand them, know their context and how to solve for them. It’s a game changer. It takes the power of the most advanced observability tool and the specific context of each application combined with our AI to resolve code issues fast.

Furthermore, our AI tools will assess code quality, identify cost optimizations, generate code and more. It’s like ‘god mode’ for Node.

This is the next step in our journey toward the future state of the SDLC. If you want to experience what Adrian can do, sign up HERE for our early access beta list and we will notify you when you can join the software development revolution.

About NodeSource, Inc.

NodeSource, Inc. is a technology company completely focused on Node.js and is dedicated to helping organizations and developers leverage the power of this technology. We offer the leading APM for monitoring and securing Node.js and provide world-class support and consulting services to help organizations navigate their Node.js journey. #KnowYourNode. For more information, visit NodeSource.com and follow @NodeSource on Twitter.

htmx in 100 seconds

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#​647 — July 13, 2023

Read on the Web

JavaScript Weekly

Driver.js: Create On-Page Tours, Highlights, and Contextual Help — A no-dependency, vanilla JavaScript library for putting together page tours and contextual help systems. The project is a few years old but has just been entirely rewritten and gained numerous enhancements, plus a huge lick of paint. There are lots of examples to check out.

Kamran Ahmed

Component Party: A Rosetta Stone of UI Library Code Examples — A comparison of different frameworks (like React, Vue, Svelte, Angular, Ember, etc.) by way of simple code snippets covering various tasks.

Mathieu Schimmerling

Test and Validate APIs Effectively and Efficiently — Gain access to several API testing tools and features that help you automate repetitive tasks, stay organized, and build robust workflows to ensure your APIs remain reliable and performant.

Postman sponsor

Prettier 3.0: Now Powered by ES Modules — The popular multi-language code formatter gets a big upgrade with a refactoring to ES modules making up the biggest change (though it can still be used as a library via CommonJS). One side effect is Prettier now supports ESM-based plugins and async parsers which means some necessary changes for Prettier plugin developers.

Sosuke Suzuki

Crockford on Plain Old JavaScript and the DOM — Over the years, Douglas has asked us to only use the good parts of JavaScript, to ▶️ stop using JavaScript, and now he suggests abandoning “the libraries” to instead work with the DOM directly. Lea Verou 🐦 picked up on this story and said this suggestion still isn’t very practical for most web apps as of 2023.

Douglas Crockford

🎉 RELEASES:

Ember 5.1 – The ambitious JS framework that’ll never give up takes a big step into the TypeScript world with stable TypeScript support and types-a-plenty.

p5.js 1.7 – Processing-inspired JavaScript library for creative coding. v1.7 introduces WebGL 2 and frame buffer support.

Prisma 5.0 – A popular ORM for Node.js and TypeScript. 5.0 boasts significant performance improvements.

typescript-eslint 6.0

⚡️ IN BRIEF:

obj?.prop = value; The optional chaining assignment proposal advanced to stage 1 at TC39 this week. (Explanatory slidedeck.)

Popular YouTube channel Fireship explains ▶️ htmx in 100 seconds – well timed, since htmx is seeing a huge amount of fresh interest. And if you’re wondering who the mastermind behind Fireship is, Honeypot has put up ▶️ a short documentary about him.

The folks at Sandworm have shared a look at the state of the npm registry including lots of trivia, history, and stats on how many packages there are, as well as the most commonly used keywords in packages.

Google shares a case study on performance of scroll-driven animations using its new browser based API versus ‘classical JavaScript techniques.’ Unsurprisingly it’s much faster running away from the main thread, and the spec remains in draft for now.

npm will now check the linked source commit and repo when you view a package’s provenance information on npmjs.com and warn you when said provenance cannot be established.

GitHub is rolling out a beta of passwordless, passkey based authentication on GitHub․com.

📒 Articles & Tutorials

Useful Functions for a (Deno) HTTP Server — You could think of HTTP in a functional way with requests going in and responses/results going out. The author explores Deno’s new Deno.serve function and how both it and the /x/http_fns functions can provide a more functional approach to common HTTP tasks.

Jollytoad

Testing the Dark Scenarios of a Node.js App — Several examples of often overlooked things you should be testing. What happens when a service times out, code is mutating things it shouldn’t, or you have zombie processes milling around? These are some of the ‘dark scenarios’ it’s not too difficult to prepare for.

Yoni Goldberg and Raz Luvaton

The 2023 State of the API Report Is Here — The State of the API is the world’s largest survey and report on APIs, with findings from over 40K developers and API professionals.

Postman sponsor

Creating Randomized Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom Patterns — Nintendo’s new Zelda game uses repeated, geometric patterns as part of its aesthetic. This post looks at how to recreate such motifs with SVG and JavaScript.

Paul Hebert

5 TS Compiler Flags You Should Include in Your Project’s Config

Igor Konovalov

Deploying a Fastify and Vue 3 Static Site to Heroku

Liran Tal

Getting Started with Vector Databases in Node.js

Valeri Karpov

🛠 Code & Tools

MDX Editor: A Rich Markdown Editor React Component — A Lexical-powered Markdown editor for React apps that supports code blocks, tables, and more. The live demo shows off most of what you need to see.

Petyo Ivanov

Meet Your New Favorite Teammate: Cody, the AI Coding Assistant — Code faster with Cody, the only code AI that knows your entire codebase, like the pair programmer you always wanted.

Sourcegraph sponsor

electron-vite: Next Generation Electron Build Tooling — Fish and chips, Bert and Ernie.. some things are just better together, and so it goes with the Electron desktop app framework and the Vite frontend toolkit. There’s also an Electron Vite Boilerplate app to kick off a new app with.

Alex Wei

📊  Vizzu 0.8: A Library for Animated Data Visualizations — Making data visualizations is reasonably easy, but animating them is harder. Vizzu steps in to help you create animated data stories and explorations. There are lots of showcases and examples to peruse.

Vizzu Inc.

🐊  Putout: A Configurable, Babel-Based Linter and Code Transformer — Provides typical linting functionality with ESLint and code transformation with Babel, but distinguishes itself by being prepared to make “more drastic code transformations” than other tools. It’s not the most popular option but it makes a good case for itself in its thorough README.

coderaiser

Standardized Audio Context: Cross-Browser Web Audio API Wrapper — A side effect-free abstraction over a subset of the Web Audio API that works reliably across all mainstream browsers.

Christoph Guttandin

Kanel: Generate TypeScript Types from Postgres — It works by inspecting a live database and outputs code you can add to a TypeScript project and use with something like Knex – GitHub repo.

Kristian Dupont

React Authentication — Without Complexity

Userfront sponsor

Boa 0.17 – An experimental Javascript lexer, parser and compiler written in Rust that can be embedded into other projects – it now has a module system.

Octokit.js 3.0
↳ Official GitHub SDK for browsers, Node, and Deno.

Release It! 16.1
↳ Automate npm package publishing and versioning.

zlFetch 6.0
↳ Convenience wrapper around the Fetch API.

Terminalizer 0.10
↳ Record your terminal and generate animated GIFs.

eslint-plugin-prettier 5.0
↳ Prettier, but as an ESLint rule.

Preact 10.16 – 3KB React compatible alternative.

💻 Jobs

Find JavaScript Jobs with Hired — Hired makes job hunting easy-instead of chasing recruiters, companies approach you with salary details up front. Create a free profile now.

Hired

🧑‍💻 Got a job listing to share? Here’s how.

🍩 Homer would approve

donut.js: donut.c, But in JavaScript — donut.c, dating from 2006, is a donut-shaped C program that, when run, animates a spinning ASCII text donut on the screen. Here’s a fresh and hot JavaScript variant!

Evan Zhou