#636 — April 27, 2023
JavaScript™ Weekly
Babylon.js 6.0: The Powerful Web-Based 3D Framework — Babylon.js remains one of the world’s leading WebGL-based graphics engines with a visual scene builder and best-in-class physically-based rendering. v6.0 includes a new physics plugin with plenty of docs and demos, fluid rendering, major improvements to how reflections are handled, screen reader support, and more. This is a huge release of a significant project in the JavaScript ecosystem and we can’t do it justice here but there’s even more on the official homepage.
Babylon.js
Handsontable 12.3: What’s New in the Excel-Like Data Grid — Released recently, the popular data editor brings improved support for React 18 and large data sets. But that’s not all – the team behind Handsontable has shared some cool insights about it in a new article. Check it out to learn more.
Handsontable sponsor
???? Oracle’s Lawyers Stir Over JavaScript™ Trademark Use — Last year, we put out a call for anyone who knows Larry Ellison to pass on the word when Ryan Dahl asked Oracle to release the JavaScript trademark, but it appears little has changed with Oracle’s lawyers taking a dim view of a new British company called “Rust for JavaScript Developers Ltd.”
Sid Chatterjee on Twitter
Trivia: This trademark issue is why the standardized form of JS is called ECMAScript.
IN BRIEF:
???? Turns out even Nintendo uses JavaScript. A developer discovered that 2015’s Mario vs. Donkey Kong: Tipping Stars for the Wii U and 3DS was written with HTML and JavaScript under the hood and managed to build a shim to get it running in a normal browser.
Chrome 113’s DevTools will allow you to override network response headers, including CORS headers. It also offers Nuxt, Vite, and Rollup debugging improvements.
???? “Switching to rspack from webpack+babel has reduced our build times by 85%.”
We covered Node.js 20’s release last week, but if you want to dig deeper into the new (experimental) permissions model, here are the full docs.
In a recent bug report on the React repo Dan Abramov noted that if you use Preact Signals with React, you forfeit any guarantee that React will work correctly and that “if React was a piece of hardware, this is exactly the kind of thing that voids the warranty.”
A sneak peek of what’s coming up in Angular 16.
RELEASES:
NodeBB 3.0
↳ JS powered forum system.
Ink 4.2
↳ Build CLI apps React-style.
Rspack 0.1.9
↳ Fast Rust-based web bundler.
create-svelte 4.0
↳ CLI for creating SvelteKit projects.
???? Articles & Tutorials
Exploring the Potential of Web Workers for Multithreading on the Web — Looks at the importance of Web Workers for multithreading in the browser, including the limitations and considerations of using them and the strategies for mitigating potential issues associated with them.
Sarah Oke Okolo
???? Partytown is worth considering if you’d like to run potentially resource intensive third-party scripts in Web Workers.
Dissecting npm Malware: Five Packages and Their ‘Evil’ Install Scripts — npm related security continues to be a big topic and a common security vector is the install script that’s run when you install a package.
Gabi Dobocan (Sandworm)
Automate Visual Tests with Chromatic—Powered by Storybook — Verify visual changes and component logic on each commit. Get started with a $500 credit using code JSWEEKLY.
Chromatic sponsor
Use Fuse.js for Quick and Easy Fuzzy Searching — Fuse.js is a zero-dependency fuzzy search library you can use to offer search features in the browser without a dedicated search-oriented backend.
Doug Shipp
Modern Alternatives to Create React App — create-react-app was the ‘go to’ for building single-page React apps, but this article touches on the wide variety of alternatives now in common use. (We’re on team Vite!)
Ayooluwa Aduwo
▶ Hot Takes on the Web — The creator of Svelte shares his thoughts on various frontend trends.
Rich Harris
How to Display a View Counter on Your Blog with React Server Components
Sebastien Castiel
???? Code & Tools
Vuetify 3.2: A Material Design Framework for Vue.js — If you’re building a Vue.js app and would rather hand off the main design decisions to someone else, yet still have a beautifully designed app, this is the component framework for you. GitHub repo.
Vuetify Team
“Super stoked for all the features coming out in v3.2 today but the one that stands out most is the global defaults improvements. It makes virtual components super powerful.”
___
John Leider, creator of Vuetify
TestGPT | Generating Meaningful Tests for Busy Devs — Get non-trivial tests suggested right inside your IDE, so you can code smart, and stay confident when you push.
CodiumAI sponsor
Memize 2.0: Unabashedly-Barebones Memoization Library — The goal here is speed, and it claims to be the fastest option. It clocks in at just 0.3KB minified, too – unsurprising, since the implementation is very straightforward.
Andrew Duthie
w2ui 2.0: A Framework Agnostic UI Library — Somehow we’d never encountered this before, but w2ui is a interesting, compact suite of common components including a grid, toolbar, tabs, and sidebar, that work with vanilla JS projects or those built with Angular, React, etc. Demos here.
Vitali Malinouski
Alfaaz: The Fastest Multilingual Word Counter — We’ll take their.. word for it ???? but at almost 1 gigabyte per second and support for CJK texts and Arabic and Urdu alphabets, there’s a lot on offer here.
Abdullah Atta
Satori: Convert HTML and CSS to SVG — Designed to be used with React and JSX. It doesn’t support all HTML but is designed to provide a familiar way to generate images from code.
Vercel
Add a Full-Featured Notification Center to Your App in Minutes
Courier sponsor
Linker.js: Access C, C++, Rust and Go Libraries from Node.js — A dynamic C-shared library linker that provides an interface for accessing any C-shared libraries (which all of C, C++, Rust and Go can produce). Linux only for now.
Bitair
Editable: An Extensible Rich Text Editor Framework — Currently depends on React, with future plans for a plain JavaScript version. Its primary feature is that it avoids using the contenteditable attribute for better interoperability. Try it in this playground.
Editable
???? 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.
QUICK RELEASES:
StatiCrypt 3.3
↳ Password protect a static HTML page.
tween.js 20.0
↳ JavaScript/TypeScript animation engine.
supercluster 8.0
↳ Geospatial point clustering library for browsers & Node.
Mercurius 13.0
↳ Implement GraphQL servers with Fastify.