#653 — September 7, 2023
😅 We’re back! After two weeks enjoying the blistering desert heat of Las Vegas and downpours of Storm Hilary, I’m ready to get back to the weekly JavaScript roundups – fingers crossed we’re here each week till Christmas now 🙂
__
Peter Cooper and the Cooperpress team
JavaScript Weekly
Astro 3.0 Released: The All-in-One Web Framework — An increasingly popular, turbo-charged site generator comfortable with not just static sites, but dynamic and interactive ones too by way of its ‘islands’ approach. You can use React, Vue, Svelte, Solid, and others, with it, and v3 adds View Transitions API support (more on that here) which can result in striking creations like this Spotify ‘clone’. It requires a play to really ‘get it’ but it’s great.
Astro Team
Good news – now SvelteKit supports the View Transitions API too 😉
Node.js 20.6 Released with Built-In Support for .env Files — The official release post covers everything new in 20.6, but the highlight is support for .env environment files to set environment variables dynamically when a script is run without requiring a third-party library like dotenv.
Phil Nash
Simplify Security and Compliance for Your Apps — Introducing Pangea: comprehensive API-based security services for developers. Effortlessly integrate foundational security services like Authentication, Authorization, and Audit Logging to create a safer app experience and accelerate your time to market.
Pangea sponsor
Bye to Rome and Hi to Biome for JS Formatting and Linting — First announced in 2020, Rome is/was an ambitious effort to create a unified frontend dev tool to bring ideas from Babel, ESLint, webpack, etc. into one place. After forming a company around Rome and raising money two years ago, things seem to have gone awry, with its key maintainers forking the project as Biome.
Emanuele Stoppa and the Biome Team
⚡️ IN BRIEF:
Version 1.0 of Bun, the notably fast JavaScriptCore-based JS runtime, is due to launch in the coming hours. There’s a livestream and, we assume, a launch post due to land here very soon.
In other ‘alternative runtime news’, the Deno team has announced native npm support on its Deno Deploy platform. They’ve also announced Deno KV is in open beta.
Mozilla: “Over the course of the year Firefox has improved by around 40% on the Vue.js benchmark” – find out why.
David Heinemeier Hansson, the creator of Ruby on Rails, announced that they’re dropping TypeScript from Turbo (a library commonly used with Rails) in favor of plain old JavaScript. Social media drama ensued.
What’s going on with the Gatsby React framework? Folks are noticing there’s not a lot going on with it lately and that 🐦 Netlify layoffs had a big impact. Netlify does, however, say 🐦 updates are coming.
GitHub has made changes to its homepage feeds. Quite a few people are unhappy about it, though.
“The CSS-in-JS sector has plateaued,” says the latest State of CSS survey.
What’s new in Svelte as of September 2023? Quite a lot.
🎉 RELEASES:
TypeScript 5.2 – Complete with the much awaited using declarations..
Node-RED 3.1 – The powerful low-code/visual programming environment gets some key improvements in its editor.
jq 1.7 – It’s not JavaScript, but surely the best JSON processing tool to exist.
Ky 1.0 – Simple HTTP client based upon Fetch for browsers, Node & Deno.
jQuery 3.7.1 – Oh yes indeedy 🎉
📒 Articles & Tutorials
Making Sense of React Server Components — This is fantastic and exactly what it says on the tin, – we’ll be focusing on it more in next week’s React Status newsletter though 😉
Josh W Comeau
You Don’t Need to Learn Svelte – Here’s Why — I mean.. you kinda do, but Kavii’s excitement is infectious and Svelte’s approach remains refreshing.
Kavii Suri
item: Using Labeled Loops in JavaScript — If using labels gives you flashbacks to BASIC and GOTO statements, I sympathize, but in JavaScript, labels open up an interesting control flow technique. More about this on MDN. continue item;
Ben Nadel
Build a Documentation Chatbot with ChatGPT and EdgeDB — Let’s do it using EdgeDB’s intuitive data model & query language, as well as its powerful TypeScript query builder.
EdgeDB sponsor
A Wide View of Automated Testing in React Apps — A straightforward and to the point introduction to why you might use automated testing, how to get going in the scope of a React app, and what to be testing.
The React Handbook
How to Create a Dual-Mode Cross-Runtime JavaScript Package — Specifically, supporting both ESM and CommonJS, and across runtimes like Node, Deno and the browser.
Hexagon
Benchmarking 24 CSV Parsing Approaches — The most extensive CSV parsing benchmark I’ve seen. The author is himself the creator of the μDSV CSV parsing library and wanted to check out the common ‘lightning fast performance’ claims of other libaries.
Leon Sorokin
The Complexity of Building an Efficient Node.js Docker Image — It’s possible to get huge reductions in image size and build time and Samuel shares his approach here, but he also questions whether all this work should be necessary.
Samuel Bodin
Learn High-Level Compilers, Tools, & Techniques – in JavaScript!
Dmitry Soshnikov Education sponsor
14 Linting Rules To Help You Write Asynchronous JS Code
Maxim Orlov
How to Create a Chrome Extension in 10 Minutes Flat
James Hibbard
🛠 Code & Tools
Peaks.js 3.0: View and Interact with Audio Waveforms — A JavaScript component for browser-based audio waveform visualization that comes from the BBC’s R&D department. There’s a live example on the homepage. GitHub repo.
BBC
🎸 SVGuitar: Create SVG-Based Guitar Chord Charts — Why not continue with the musical theme? 😁 You can experiment with this one via this live demo.
Raphael Voellmy
FormKit 1.0: The Open-Source Form Framework for Vue — Ships with production-ready scaffolding like inputs, forms, submission and error handling, and validation rules.
FormKit, Inc.
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
Plate: Roll Your Own Slate-Based Rich-Text Editor — A framework for building React-based rich text editors where you can select the specific features and functionality you need. GitHub repo.
Ziad Beyens
Math.js: An Extensive Math Library for Node and Browser — Work with complex numbers, fractions, units, matrices, symbolic computation, etc. A long standing library now, but continuing to get frequent updates. GitHub repo.
Jos de Jong
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
💻 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.
npm-to-yarn – Convert npm commands to yarn and vice versa.
export-to-csv – Export arrays of objects to CSV.
Marked 8.0 – Fast Markdown parsing library. (Demo.)
Perfectionist 2.0 – ESLint plugin for sorting various data.
React Native Vision Camera 3.0
↳ Powerful camera control for React Native apps.
YouTube.js 6.3
↳ Client library for YouTube’s internal API.
Ink 4.4 – Use React to build CLI apps.