Tag: Framework

Every Framework Everywhere All at Once

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#​665 — November 30, 2023

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JavaScript Weekly

Eliminating JS Framework Lock-in with Web Components? — Can you build an app where each component is using a different framework? Amazingly, yes. Web components aren’t new but are ‘having a moment’ and Jake demos an interesting, if contrived, use case. He explains: “Say you’re writing a Vue app and you really want to use a library that’s only available as a React component. You can wrap that library in a web component and use it in your Vue app…”

Jake Lazaroff

Announcing Deno Cron — Deno adds a cron-style feature to run code on a pre-defined schedule using Deno.cron. This works locally (behind –unstable) in a long-running process, but on Deno Deploy it analyzes the definition and runs the code on time, as you’d expect, with no extra work needed.

Zinkovsky and Jiang (Deno)

Feel the Power of More Than 420,000 Teammates and Work #LikeABosch — At Bosch, we shape the future with high-quality technologies and services to inspire people and improve their lives. And it’s our people who make us remarkable. Our success is your success. Let’s celebrate together. Learn more.

Bosch sponsor

The Biome Formatter Wins the ‘Prettier Challenge’ — Two weeks ago, the creator of Prettier put up a $10k bounty for a Rust-powered code formatter that could pass over 95% of Prettier’s tests. Biome, the toolchain forked from Rome, has already managed to claim the prize, topped up by further contributors.

Biome

🤔 There’s a post from the Prettier POV where @vjeux explains why he offered the bounty: he felt a ‘a lack of competition’ was holding Prettier back.

IN BRIEF:

📺 Evan You, creator of Vue.js, presented an update on the state of Vue and Vite for VueConf Toronto attendees. (48 minutes.)

🟩 The two LTS Node.js branches have received releases backporting features from newer versions: Node v20.10.0 (LTS) gains WebSocket and an experimental flag to auto-detect ESM code. Node v18.19.0 (LTS) gets npm 10 and tweaks for customization hooks and loaders.

🎙️ Off The Main Thread is a new podcast featuring Jake Archibald and Surma (both formerly of Google / HTTP 203).

🎂 Not to do with JS – though some of you may use it – but Notepad++ is 20 years old. It’s a popular open source code editor and Notepad replacement for Windows.

🙋 The State of JavaScript 2023 survey is still open to take.

RELEASES:

Passport 0.7 – Popular authentication middleware for Express-based apps.

eta (η) 3.2 – Embedded JS template engine for Node, Deno, and browsers.

Fable 4.6 – F# to JavaScript transpiler.

📄 Articles & Tutorials

▶  10 JavaScript Changes You (May Have) Missed in 2023 — We’ve covered most of these, but this is still a productive refresher in just six minutes, covering things like toSorted(), iOS Web Push, Next.js updates, Angular 17, and the rapid rise of Bun.

Fireship on YouTube

Fireship is a great channel for these sort of quick-fire roundups, and if you want more 100+ JavaScript Concepts You Need to Know is a fun one.

Tracking Frontend JS Exceptions with Playwright Fixtures — Playwright is commonly used to test frontend apps and ensure they’re rendering and behaving correctly, but what if you want to be sure the underlying JavaScript is working as expected too? Stefan has some tips.

Stefan Judis

Lesser Spotted React Mistakes and How to Avoid Them — Read about common pitfalls that occur when writing React code. Cut, paste, & try the included examples in your own code.

Sonar sponsor

A Deep Dive into CheerpJ 3.0: A WASM JVM for the Browser — A look at an interesting WebAssembly-based Java Virtual Machine that runs client side in the browser, opening up bidirectional Java-JavaScript interop, if you need it. Note that it’s commercial, but can be used free for personal projects and evaluation.

Pignotti, Bates, and De Rossi

A Simple WebSocket Benchmark: Node vs Bun — Using as ‘textbook’ an example of WebSocket communication as possible, the author pits Node and Bun against each other.

Daniel Lemire

Svelte Through the Eyes of a React Developer

Ido Shamun

🛠 Code & Tools

FullCalendar: A Full Sized JavaScript Calendar Control — An interesting option if you want a Google Calendar style experience for your own apps. Has connectors for React, Vue and Angular. The base version is MIT licensed, but there’s a commercial version too with extra features.

Adam Shaw

Knip 3.3: Find Unused Files, Dependencies and Exports — Finds unused files, dependencies and exports in your projects and lets you cut/knip them away.

Lars Kappert

😍 Knip has continued to evolve a lot this year, and now also has a snazzy new homepage. You can also learn more about what’s new in 3.x.

Inline REPL Anywhere in Your Code — Execute context aware code snippets directly in your editor, anywhere in your project, even if your application/tests are not working.

Wallaby Team sponsor

Syntax.js: Code Syntax Highlighting Library — There are many long standing options in this area, such as Prism and highlight.js, but it’s interesting to see a fresh and lightweight take.

William Troup

ai2html: Turn Adobe Illustrator Files into HTML — We noticed this tool being used by the Financial Times to share graphs they’ve designed, and the result is really good. This project isn’t new, but we haven’t shared it before, it’s well maintained, and there are lots of examples.

The New York Times Company

aws-lite: A New Node.js-Powered AWS API Client — AWS does a good job with its APIs and tooling, but sometimes their approach is a little heavyweight. aws-lite provides a simpler, faster option. “You can think of it as a community-driven alternative to AWS’s JavaScript SDK.”

Begin

Hire Vetted Developers in US Time Zones, Fast

Revelo sponsor

Neutralinojs 4.15.0 – Cross-platform desktop app framework – lighter than Electron as it uses the locally available browser engine.

jest-image-snapshot 6.3 – Jest matcher for image comparisons.

Mongoose 8.0 – MongoDB object modelling approach.

edit-in-place 1.9 – Edit in place library for Angular apps.

Jotai 2.6 – Simple, flexible state management for React.

sql.js 1.9 – SQLite 3.44 compiled to JavaScript.

React Share 5.0 – Social media sharing buttons.

np 9.0 – A better npm publish.

pnpm 8.11 – Fast, disk space efficient package manager.

NOTABLE QUOTABLE

“As a principal engineer, I view it as my role to keep us off the bleeding edge as much as possible. That way, when we really do need to innovate, we have the capacity to do so. And when we don’t need to, we can go really freaking fast.”

___
Nicole Tietz

Angular is back

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#​662 — November 9, 2023

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JavaScript Weekly

Reintroducing Angular with Angular v17 — Angular first appeared in the shape of AngularJS in 2010 and helped launch a wave of large-scale JavaScript frameworks. Angular remains popular in many use cases but is often overlooked in favor of newer options. v17 takes a leap forward in both features and vision, with the team rebranding Angular and repositioning it as a modern solution:

Angular.dev is an all-new docs site and home for the project (the new guides look fantastic). It’s in beta till Angular v18 is released – you can learn more about it here.
Hydration is now production ready.
Vite and esbuild are the default for new projects.
Improved support for creating server side apps.
New, improved built-in control flow to make code less verbose.
Google pulled out all the stops for ▶️ the ‘Special Angular Event’ – an hour of talks, interviews and discussions to bring you up to speed.

Minko Gechev and the Angular.js Team

Bare Metal JavaScript: The JavaScript Virtual Machine with Miško Hevery — Learn how high-level JavaScript turns into low-level CPU instructions. Build up your mental model of JavaScript’s performance characteristics through understanding the JavaScript Virtual machine under the hood!

Frontend Masters sponsor

Mastering DOM Manipulation with Plain JavaScript — A mega collection of hundreds of examples of doing things like selecting text, manipulating elements, resizing things, scrolling, and such – all by using the DOM and browser APIs with no external libraries. You Might Not Need jQuery is another classic resource in a similar vein.

Phuoc Nguyen

▶  Why Signals Are Better Than React Hooks — When Preact’s Marvin Hagemeister pops up in the comments saying “this is by far the best video about signals and why they are so exciting. I love the way you demonstrate it by coding along and moving an app over to signals,” it should bump a video up to the top of the Watch Later playlist.

Web Dev Simplified

👀 Nicholas C. Zakas shares a look at what’s coming in ESLint v9.0. The first alpha is due in a month or two.

⚛️ React has landed a commit adding sourcemaps for prod build artifacts.

🆚 VS Code will soon support moving editors into floating windows.

RELEASES:

TypeScript 5.3 RC – Final due soon, but you get import attributes, resolution-mode in import types, interactive inlay hints for types, and improvements to narrowing in a few extra cases.

It’s a strong week for testing tool releases, so they’re all in one place: TestCafe v3.4.0, Cypress 13.5, Nightwatch.js 3.3, and React Testing Library 14.1.

Deno 1.38 – Many smaller improvements, including far faster JSX transformation.

Bun v1.0.10 – Faster node:http and bug fixes.

tsx 4.0 – Node.js enhanced to run TypeScript / ESM files.

📄 Articles & Tutorials

How to Do a JS to TypeScript Conversion — Chris, who led the conversion of a 150k LOC app to TypeScript, addresses a common question: do-it-as-you-go or follow the dependency graph?

Chris Krycho

Exploring the Headless Component Pattern for Composing React UIs — An engineer at Atlassian takes us on a thorough and practical journey into the concept of headless components and the pattern of having reusable logic and behavior separate from the presentation of UI elements.

Juntao Qiu

📞 Calling JavaScript Devs! Sentry Launch Week is Coming. Join Online

Sentry sponsor

▶  8 Talks from JetBrains’ JavaScript Day 2023 — JavaScript Day is an annual virtual event featuring a handful of talks on diverse JS related topics. This year, Romulo Cintra shows us how TC39 works on language proposals, Stefan Baumgartner spoke about the lies we tell ourselves using TypeScript, and more.

JetBrains

Writing Components That Work in Any Framework — Looks at why web components can be difficult to adopt, and shows how using a higher-level library can let us “easily write components that work everywhere”.

Andrico Karoulla

Build a Lightweight Code Generator with TypeScript and JSON Imports

John Ruble

Deploying a Vue Application with Netlify and GitHub

Ezekiel Lawson (Telerik)

Don’t Disable Buttons, Do This..

Chris Ferdinandi

🛠 Code & Tools

Moveable: A Library for Dragging, Resizing, Scaling and More — If you want to offer up physical manipulation of elements (warping, pinching, rotating, etc.) this library could help. Its homepage is a fun self-demo and there are packages for integrations with common frameworks.

Younkue Choi

🔥 Need to Eliminate Tech Debt Without Falling into Dependency Hell? — Upgrade seamlessly and let us tackle tech debt with our fixed-cost, monthly maintenance service (starting at $2k/month).

UpgradeJS | Tech Debt Services sponsor

🖼  image-dimensions: Get the Dimensions of Images — Sindre’s latest creation is a simple but comprehensive one. A way to get the size (as width and height in pixels) for JPEG, PNG, APNG, and GIFs in any modern JS environment.

Sindre Sorhus

main-thread-scheduling 9.0: Consistently Responsive Apps While Staying on the Main Thread — An easier alternative to Web Workers that uses the approach of stopping heavy tasks on the main thread from executing when the user interacts with the UI. This new version adds afterFrame (like requestAnimationFrame but called after frame drawing has rendered), queueTask, and extensions to promises.

Antonio Stoilkov

React Components for the Google Maps JavaScript API — react-google-maps is the ‘first Google-sponsored library’ for integrating Google Maps JavaScript API components into a React app.

Mike Pegg (Google Cloud)

capture-website 4.0: Capture Screenshots of Websites — A Puppeteer wrapper to capture screenshots of site from Node or the command-line.

Sindre Sorhus

Never Stop Learning and Work #LikeABosch — At Bosch, you always keep growing. Upskill yourself into countless new roles, positions and opportunities. Learn more.

Bosch sponsor

⌘K-sv: A Fast, Composable, Unstyled Command Menu for Svelte — A port of ⌘K, a React-based command menu component.

huntabyte

Vuetify v3.4 – Vue component framework.

MiniSearch 6.2 – In-memory fulltext search engine. (Demo.)

TanStack Form 0.9 – Headless type-safe form state management.

Dependency Cruiser v15.2 – Tool to validate and visualize dependencies.

Valtio v1.12.0 – Proxy state made simple. Plus it has a fantastic homepage.

Helmet 7.1 – Secure Express apps with HTTP headers.

Rollup.js 4.3 – ES module bundler.

NOTABLE QUOTABLE

“The first 90% of the code accounts for the first 90% of the development time. The remaining 10% of the code accounts for the other 90% of the development time.”

___
Tom Cargill

🚀 Everyone’s gone to the moon..

Spacekit.js: A Library for Creating 3D Space Visualizations — Not just any old 3D space, but actual space – think planets, stars, and meteors. A library like this comes, of course, with many examples to try. GitHub repo.

Ian Webster

Big news for both Next.js and Remix

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#​661 — November 2, 2023

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JavaScript Weekly

Next.js 14 Released — Unveiled at last week’s Next.js Conf, v14 caused a lot of community discussion (not least on Hacker News), largely surrounding Server Actions being declared stable and the ‘backend-meets-frontend’ opportunities this opens up. A new partial prerendering feature is also in preview, allowing for dynamic responses but with the speed of an initial static response.

Lee Robinson and Tim Neutkens

💡 The New Stack has an overview of the release, and Focus Reactive has a (highly visual) recap of Next.js Conf itself – recommended if you didn’t watch the stream.

SDKs & OpenAPI Specs in Minutes Using Zod, tsoa, or Fastify — Using popular TS tooling to build your API? Our guides show you how to go from code to best in class OpenAPI specs & SDKs.

Speakeasy sponsor

Remix ❤️ Vite: Remix 2.2 Introduces Vite Support — Remix is a popular full-stack JavaScript framework that began as a paid product, but has been open source for two years now. If you found Remix’s compilation approach opaque before, we have great news: “With Vite, Remix is no longer a compiler. Remix itself is just a Vite plugin.” This post tells the full story.

Cattori and Dalgleish (Remix)

🗳 The folks behind the State of JavaScript survey have unveiled a new State of React survey to take. As with their other surveys, you get to test your knowledge as well as provide useful insights.

🔁 Shadow is a new, experimental browser engine built in JavaScript itself. It renders its output in your usual browser using an HTML canvas. Source code.

🔐 GitHub is scanning all public npm packages for leaked secrets. Note that if secrets are found, the provider associated with those secrets is notified.

❄️ WinterJS is a new JS Service Workers server, powered by Rust & SpiderMonkey.

🐥 Uh-oh, it’s Flappy Bird implemented in TypeScript types.

RELEASES:

Astro 3.4 – The Web framework gains page partials, a new experimental dev overlay, and more.

Visual Studio Code October 2023 – A couple of minor enhancements to the JS debugger, and Copilot Chat (if you have GitHub Copilot) can now provide better answers because it’s sent implementation details behind the symbols you mention.

jQuery 4.0 is 100% feature complete but it’s not released just yet.. but we know you can’t wait. Ditto for Angular 17 – more on that soon.

Rollup 4.2, Cypress 13.4, Ember.js 5.4, Stencil 4.7

📒 Articles & Tutorials

Speeding Up the JavaScript Ecosystem: Tailwind CSS — Marvin’s ongoing journey to improve our ecosystem by finding low-hanging performance-bearing fruit continues with a look at how the architecture of Tailwind CSS could be tuned.

Marvin Hagemeist

A New Way to Bring Garbage Collected Languages Efficiently to WebAssembly — WasmGC is a new and promising way to implement GC languages in WebAssembly and it’s now enabled by default in Chrome.

Alon Zakai (V8)

Generally Awesome UI Components For Project Management and Scheduling — Level up your UX with advanced data grids, calendars, schedulers, and Gantt charts.

Bryntum sponsor

▶  Your Website Does Not Need JavaScript — An hour long talk in which Amy builds a completely static website — using a collection of HTML and CSS files with no tracking, no scripting, no servers, and no third-party resources.

Amy Kapernick

Building a Generic RSS Parser Service with Cloudflare Workers — Ray walks through various iterations and improvements in trying to build an RSS parser that can work in the Workers environment.

Raymond Camden

Can Next.js Handle 5000 Pages? — Christian set out to push both Next.js and AWS Amplify hard. A good read.

Christian Nwamba

🗣 Is Express Still the ‘De-Facto’ Choice for Building Node.js Webapps?

Hacker News

🛠 Code & Tools

Svelte Flow: Node-Based UI for Svelte — From the creators of React Flow comes a Svelte version in the shape of a customizable Svelte component for building node-based editors and interactive diagrams. Check out the examples.

webkid GmbH

Docusaurus 3.0: Meta’s Static Site Generator — Docusaurus is a popular React-powered tool aimed at building documentation sites, though it handles more general sites too. v3 features an upgrade to MDX v3, React 18, Mermaid v10, and essentially updates everything.

Sébastien Lorber

Get Logged Values Right Where You Need Them: In Your Editor — Simply start your editor, and your development server/test runner in watch mode, and see values next to your code. No setup required.

Wallaby Team sponsor

Hotkey 2.2: Declarative Keyboard Shortcuts for HTML — Set a data-hotkey attribute on your elements to quickly add keyboard shortcuts. v2.2 improves Mac alt/option support.

GitHub

Is Text or Binary? 7.0 — This library first tries to determine from a filename if the contents of the associated file are likely to be binary or text. Failing that, it can then look at the actual data to figure it out.

Bevry

<browser-window>: A Web Component to Create Pretend Browser Windows on the Web — A lightweight themed zero-dependency web component wrapper to emulate a Safari-like browser window within a Web page. The page full of demos might give you some ideas for its use.

Zach Leatherman

Add Authorization, MFA, Biometrics to Your JavaScript App in Minutes

FusionAuth sponsor

lossless-json: Parse JSON Without Losing Numeric Information — JSON.parse can trip over when it comes to large numbers, so this library parses numeric values not as regular numbers but in a lightweight lossless way keeping the value as a string.

Jos de Jong

Vueform: An Open Source Form Framework for Vue.js — This has been around for a while but is now MIT licensed. Its ancillary form builder app stays commercial, but isn’t mandatory for using the library. GitHub repo.

Vueform

sweetalert2 v11.9 – Customizable, accessible replacement for alert()

YouTube.js 7.0 – Wrapper around YouTube’s internal API.

eslint-plugin-unicorn 49 – Over 100 useful ESLint rules.

NOTABLE QUOTABLE

“If it doesn’t work, it doesn’t matter how fast it doesn’t work.”

___
Mich Ravera

💛 And something else we love

Val Town 3.0: A Social Way to Write and Deploy TypeScript — “If GitHub Gists Could Run, and AWS Lambda Were Fun” is a fantastic description for this online platform where you write tiny bite size functions (‘val’s) to be run in V8 isolates. You can connect them together, schedule them, serve them up over HTTP, and more. Version 3 is a big jump for the platform, adding JSX support, more standardized JavaScript approaches to solving problems, and the ability to edit and run your ‘vals’ locally.

Steve Krouse

Advancing the NodeSource Node.js Package Repo (Including User-Requested Upgrades!)

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For over a decade, NodeSource has developed and maintained a Node.js package repository that, has become the standard for production use globally. We are excited to announce some significant updates to this repo that include a large number of items related to user requests. (Note that there is an important point in the section below about using the new repo as the old repo will remain available but no longer be supported with new versions)

We handle over 100 million downloads of the open-source binaries each year, developers rely on our timely releases (fastest in the ecosystem) and tooling to simplify their use of the Node.js Runtime. Every time there is a release, including security updates, our team delivers updates in less than 48 hours.

Img 1- Type of Distributions

As part of our ongoing commitment to the ecosystem, we want to ensure that developers who rely on our repository have access to a robust and efficient resource led by our Node experts. A key objective with this update was to enhance the Node.js package distribution experience, making it more intuitive, feature-rich, and responsive to user needs. In the following sections, we’ll dive into the improvements we’ve made, highlighting the changes that promise to make your development journey easier.

Check it out HERE and let us know your thoughts!

New Features

Version Choice (Made Easy): We have added versatility with the latest update to our repository, gone are the days of being locked into the latest Node.js release. Now, you can choose the specific version of Node.js you need to tailor your environment to the unique needs of your project.

Universal distribution support: Say goodbye to server customization and compatibility concerns. Our repository now seamlessly supports all distributions. You don’t need to adjust for each new OS version, all are supported out-of-the-box.

Seamless CDN transition: We’ve revamped our CDN provider to address cache-related issues. This change ensures a smoother, more reliable experience and eliminates cache-related hiccups..

Streamlined installation requirements: Installing Node.js should be a snap. That’s why we’ve carefully configured the necessary installation requirements. The package now includes the required glibc and Python3 configurations, making the setup more accessible.

Simplified installation process: Recognizing the diversity of our user base, we’ve redesigned the installation process—no more complex scripts to decipher. Instead, we’ve streamlined it to a few simple lines of code. Installation is now easy and accessible for users of all skill levels.

These improvements demonstrate our commitment to providing a repository experience that keeps pace with technological demands and prioritizes user convenience and satisfaction.

⚠️ IMPORTANT: Use the new repository!

Failing to migrate to the new repository could be significant, most notably is the potential denial of access to the latest versions of Node.js. Because these latest versions will be distributed exclusively through the new repository, those who do not migrate will miss important updates, improvements, and features.

For more information on the new repository including details regarding the migration process, we recommend you visit the following link for the repository wiki, which provides comprehensive information on making a successful transition.

Our Distributions Journey

Our mission to help developers gain access to Node.js and enable the enterprise to adopt it safely has been a key driver for our binary distribution effort. We have seen tremendous growth in the number of downloads every year from our distributions across the globe.

Img 2- Request per Country and Data Transfer by Country per 24H

Our flagship product, N|Solid, an enterprise-grade version of the Node.js Runtime, is a testament to this devotion to OSS, and was a key part of why we created this repo that is used by millions of developers to power a massive number of applications. Our Node and Infra experts will continue to support this repo for the community with great pride.

> This repository has seen a staggering number of annual package downloads, over 120 million, and a data consumption rate of around 300 terabytes per month. This endeavor hasn’t been without its challenges, as maintaining such a repository has required extraordinary dedication and effort.

Earlier this year we made the decision to open-source our N|Solid Runtime marking a key turning point for NodeSource, inspiring us to extend our commitment to the repository. (The OSS version of N|Solid will be available in October of this year)

_> Recognizing the symbiotic relationship between Node.js and N|Solid, we decided to merge their paths. _

By distributing Node.js and N|Solid together, we’re creating a unified ecosystem that takes advantage of the power of Node combined with the advancements of N|Solid. This dynamic coupling invites those familiar with our repository to explore what we refer to as “enterprise Node.js,” or the Node.js that enterprises have been waiting for. This synergy is a testament to our commitment to both the Node.js community and the growth of enterprise-grade solutions.

Conclusion

As we embark on this transformative phase, we reflect on our journey in this ecosystem. We’ve been privileged to play a role in supporting developers and companies, and we’re excited to further enhance our collaboration.

Today, we invite you to explore our new repository, HERE, – a hub of choice and compatibility, empowering you to select the Node.js version that suits your needs. But that’s just the beginning of the story. If you are interested in our Enterprise version N|Solid it’s available to you for FREE with additional pricing packages for larger projects/teams and support.

Stay tuned for further enhancements as we refine and enrich your experience.Thank you for being a part of our journey. Here’s to many more years of collaboration and growth!

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.

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.

htmx in 100 seconds

Posted on by

#​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

Svelte 4 released

Posted on by

#​644 — June 22, 2023

Read on the Web

JavaScript Weekly

UnsuckJS: Comparing Lightweight JavaScript Options — “No build tools, no compilers, and no hassle.” It’s a table of frontend JavaScript libraries on a simple page – that’s it! But it’s a handy table, letting you see the relative popularity, size, and latest versions of libraries as diverse as Preact, bau, htmx, Hyperapp, and Mithril.

Adam Hill

Svelte 4 Released — Four years on from Svelte 3.0 comes the latest major release of the popular compile-time framework that isn’t afraid to do things its own way. If you’re new to it, hit the interactive tutorial to get a feel for things, or if you’re already a user, enjoy the v3 to v4 migration guide, overhauled site, and extra performance on offer.

Rich Harris and the Svelte Team

🤔 Claudio Holanda’s ‘Thoughts on Svelte(Kit), one year and 3 billion requests later‘ provides some interesting balance to our cheerleading.

The Complete UI Component Library For Enterprise Web Apps — A professional UI component library with power widgets like data grid, calendar, scheduler & Gantt charts. Includes API docs, guides and an unreasonable amount of demos to play with. Seamlessly integrates with React, Angular, Vue & Salesforce apps.

Bryntum sponsor

A Look at TypeScript 5.2’s New Keyword: using — using brings something akin to Python’s with context management into TypeScript by providing a way to automatically run a Symbol.dispose function when an object leaves scope. You could use this to shut down database connections, close file handles, etc.

Matt Pocock

If you’re not a TS fan, the idea behind using is also an ECMAScript proposal (currently at stage 3) called Explicit Resource Management and there’s more detail to enjoy in their examples.

The ‘Getting Started with AI’ Stack — Andreessen Horowitz (a.k.a. a16z) is a well known VC firm, but they also have an engineering team of their own that has come up with a “getting started with AI” template for JavaScript devs who want to play with modern ML technologies without too much thinking about tooling.

Li, Li, and Casado (Andreessen Horowitz)

⚡️ IN BRIEF:

The Register reports malicious actors are exploiting expired S3 buckets to inject harmful code into legitimate npm packages without needing to modify existing code.

Fresh, a Deno-first full-stack Web framework, has a new release in the shape of Fresh 1.2. There have been some concerns over its maintenance, but now there’s a new full-time maintainer, Marvin Hagemeister, and a lot of promise on the horizon. Welcome Marvin!

RELEASES:

Node.js 20.3.1, 18.16.1 and 16.20.1 – Security releases.

React Native 0.72

Nest 10.0 – Popular Node.js framework for building enterprise-grade apps.

ESLint 8.43

📒 Articles & Tutorials

Synchronizing Videos or 3D Model Rotations to Scroll Driven Animations — With just a little JavaScript, you can control 3D models and/or videos using scroll-driven animations. It’s a common effect seen on modern fashion sites.

Bramus van Damme

▶  Recreating a JS Runtime to Understand Node’s Magic — Popular speaker, educator, Microsoft MVP and Node.js core team member Erick gives a very enthusiastic talk on the latest ‘hello world’ in the JavaScript world: building a runtime 😏 Somehow, Erick manages to run through the key concepts involved in just 20 minutes.

Erick Wendel

E-Commerce Simplified — A practical guide to building your Store with Storyblok, Commercetools, and React.js.

Storyblok sponsor

Positioning Anchored Popovers — Popovers are commonly positioned relative to their invoker — but when using the new popover attribute, anchoring can be tricky as these popovers are placed in the top layer, away from the context of their invoker. Hidde looks at options to resolve this.

Hidde de Vries

▶  React Server Components in Under Seven Minutes — Looking to quickly get a basic handle on RSCs? This fast-paced video tries to bootstrap you on the subject.

CodeLit

A Visual Guide to Understanding Node’s Event Loop

Vishwas Gopinath

Where to Host Your Remix App in 2023

Jacob Paris

🛠 Code & Tools

Selecto.js: Make Elements Selectable Within a Drag Area — Let’s say you have a number of elements that represent choices, data, whatever, and you want users to be able to select a subset of them by clicking/pointing and dragging. That’s what this does. Live examples here.

Daybrush (Younkue Choi)

Tuple – The Fastest Way to Onboard New Devs — Waste hours verbally steering on Zoom? New hires learn your codebase faster with Tuple. Trusted by over 40,000 devs.

Tuple sponsor

AutoAnimate: Add Motion to Your Apps with a Single Line of Code — You can view some nice examples on the page and this can be used with React, Vue, Svelte, or just plain JavaScript.

FormKit

Toad Scheduler: In-Memory Node and Browser Job Scheduler — Provides more structure than setTimeout or setInterval and supports cron-style scheduling.

Igor Savin

Kysely: A Fluent, Type-Safe SQL Query Builder — Inspired by Knex and targeting Node, it also works in Deno and the browser and boasts a good autocompletion experience thanks to its fluent API. GitHub repo.

Sami Koskimäki

AI.JSX: A JSX-Powered AI App Framework — It’s not React, but gives a React-like feel to letting you specify how large language models, such as ChatGPT, should integrate with your app. Luckily there’s a set of tutorials.

Fixie.ai

Generate SBOMs Effortlessly with Snyk

Snyk sponsor

💡 An SBOM is a “software bill of materials” – essentially an inventory of dependencies and components that make up an application, as Liran Tal explains.

🐼  Panda CSS: Modern, Build-Time, Type-Safe CSS-in-JS — A new DX-focused CSS-in-JS approach boasting build-time generated styles and type safety out of the box. It works with Remix, Vite, Next.js, Astro, and server components.

Segun Adebayo

React Wrap Balancer 1.0: A Component for Better Displayed Title Text — A component that improves the rendering of titles by avoiding overhanging words. v1.0 is a key release that lets the component use the native CSS text-wrap property when supported.

Shu Ding

Perspective 2.3 – Data visualization and analytics component. The core is written in C++ and compiled to WebAssembly where it can be used from JavaScript.

Tesseract.js 4.1.1 – Pure JS OCR for 100+ languages. Fixes a key bug for processing images taken with iOS devices.

Shoelace 2.5
↳ Well designed, framework agnostic UI component suite.

TestCafe 3.0
↳ Node.js tool to automated end-to-end testing.

AlaSQL 4.1
↳ JS SQL database for browser and Node.

Octokit.js 2.1
↳ GitHub SDK for browsers, Node, and Deno.

💻 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.

The return of ECMAScript 2023 (and Angular)

Posted on by

#​634 — April 13, 2023

Read on the Web

JavaScript Weekly

The JavaScript Equality Table Game — Minesweeper will feel like a walk in the park after this reminder of the horrors of JavaScript’s ==. If you need to go in depth, Section 7.2.14 of the ECMAScript spec will help, but otherwise? Stick to three equals (===) unless you have a good reason not to.

Reinis Ivanovs

htmx 1.9 Released — htmx (homepage) is an increasingly popular library outside of the JavaScript space as it lets folks use things like WebSockets, SSE, AJAX, and CSS transitions by marking up HTML rather than writing lots of JavaScript. v1.9 adds support for view transitions and generalized inline event handling. The code examples are worth a look – htmx makes a lot possible, with rather little tooling or markup needed.

htmx team

Supercharge AWS S3 Video Streaming with ImageKit’s Video API — Get adaptive bitrate streaming, video optimizations, format conversions, and real-time transformations and watermarking by attaching ImageKit with your AWS S3 bucket.

ImageKit sponsor

The ECMAScript® 2023 Language Spec Steps Forward — After prematurely announcing the progression of the ES2023 spec in February, we can now announce: TC39 has approved the ECMAScript 2023 spec, and while it remains a candidate, it’s now a step closer to eventual ECMA General Assembly approval. The finished proposals list for 2023 now includes Array find from last, hashbang support, Symbols as WeakMap keys, and change Array by copy.

ECMA International

IN BRIEF:

▶️ Angular is back with a vengeance, says Fireship.

Serverless platform AWS Lambda has introduced response streaming on its JS runtime (for now) so you can send response data as it becomes available rather than all at once. (→ Via Serverless Status)

/[]/ A look at a seemingly JS-specific quirk in regular expressions when empty character classes are used.

An analysis of languages used in GitHub pull requests shows JavaScript/TypeScript leading the way with Python just slightly behind. The comments went in lots of odd directions here.

Seven folks at Vue Amsterdam 2023 shared their ▶️ tips on getting started with Vue.js.

▶️ An hour-long chat on the State of Node.js with some leading figures.

Node v18.16.0 (LTS) has been released with backported support for compiling JavaScript code into a single executable app. Node 19’s Ada URL parser also appears.

A striking visual introduction to React and its fundamental concepts.

RELEASES:

Node.js v19.9 (Current)

Puppeteer v19.9 – It’s the week for almost 20s.

pnpm 8.2 – Efficient npm alternative.

Redwood 4.5 – Popular app framework.

Storybook 7.0 – With an official release post this time.

???? Articles & Tutorials

Ranger: Use a Range-Like Syntax for Anything? — const numbers = 1[[…8]], anyone? This is a neat trick for a bit of syntatic sugar, but I’m not sure it would pass the sniff test for most teams. You might find the implementation interesting to check out though. Long may this sort of experimentation continue.

Jon Randy

???? A proposal for JavaScript to get built-in range support is at stage 2.

????  Build and Deploy ‘23: May 3rd – Save the Date! — The ultimate CI/CD virtual conference – best practices and end-user success stories from DevOps experts. Plus, a keynote from Emily Freeman, author of DevOps for Dummies.

Codefresh sponsor

Trying Node’s Built-In Test Runner — In 2022, Node gained an experimental built-in test runner (node:test). It’s going to become stable in the forthcoming Node v20, so it’s a good time to look at how it works and how it compares to other solutions you might already be using.

Gleb Bahmutov

▶  The Right Way To Merge JavaScript Objects — In just one minute, too.

Jack Herrington

Ref vs. Reactive: What to Choose When Using Vue 3 Composition API?

Michael Hoffmann

How to Stream File Uploads to S3 Object Storage from Node.js

Austin Gil

How to Contribute to a Project You Have No Idea About

Michal Warda

???? Code & Tools

Reveal.js 4.5: An HTML Presentation Framework — Brings elegant presentations to anyone with a Web browser. v4.5 was just released with support for jumping to specific slides, a few new themes, and with live reload working with files in subfolders.

Hakim El Hattab

List.js: Add Search, Sort, Filters, and More to Tables and Lists — A handy library for adding search, sort, filters and flexibility to tables, lists or other HTML elements. Want an example? Why, of course.

Jonny Strömberg

????Quokka.js – #1 JavaScript Scratchpad for VS Code — With 2M+ downloads, Quokka.js is the #1 tool for exploring and testing JavaScript/TypeScript. Code runs immediately as you type.

Wallaby.js sponsor

Queue: Async Function Queue with Adjustable Concurrency — Exports a class Queue that implements most of the Array API.

Jesse Tane

Yet Another React Lightbox — Add a lightbox component to your projects “in minutes” – there are several examples to try, as well as a playground with adjustable settings. GitHub repo.

Igor Danchenko

Sandpack 2.6: Component Toolkit for Creating Live Code Editing Experiences — Created by the folks at CodeSandbox, so they surely know what they’re doing in this space. GitHub repo.

CodeSandbox

Easy to Use, Full-Stack Application Monitoring

TelemetryHub sponsor

TS Writer: A Template String Template Engine for Generating Code at Runtime — Rather niche, but aimed at situations where you might need to generate code at runtime in TypeScript.

tinylibs

Minimatch 9.0
↳ Glob matcher library.
     minimatch(“bar.foo”, “*.foo”)

hls.js 1.4
↳ Play HLS in browsers with support for MSE.

Partytown 0.8
↳ Relocate third-party scripts off the main thread.

Plasmo 0.68
↳ “It’s like Next.js for browser extensions”

Obsidian 8.0 – GraphQL, built for Deno.

MUI X 6.1 – React component suite.

TestCafe 2.5 – Automate end-to-end web testing.

Maquette 3.6 – Lightweight virtual DOM library.

Venom 5.0 – WhatsApp bot library.

???? 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

Full Stack JavaScript Engineer @ Emerging Cybersecurity Startup — Small team/big results. Fun + flexible + always interesting. Come build our award-winning, all-in-one cybersecurity platform.

Defendify

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

Java-Script Jarre

Posted on by Simon Helberg

#​621 — January 13, 2023

Read on the Web

JavaScript Weekly

The State of JS 2022 — The State of JS is one of the JavaScript ecosystem’s most popular surveys and this time 39,471 folks took part giving us a snapshot of the tools, technologies, and language features people are using (or not using!) There’s a lot to go through, but here are some key points:

top-level await is the most newly adopted feature recently.
The JavaScript / TypeScript balance shows a majority of developers using TypeScript over JS.
Express remains by far the most popular backend framework with Nest, Fastify, Strapi, and Koa following somewhat behind.
Other interesting results can be found in JS pain points, what is currently missing from JS, and the ‘Awards’ for stand out items (complete with snazzy visual effects).

Devographics

🧈 Retire your Legacy CMS with ButterCMS — ButterCMS is your new content backend. We’re SaaS so we host, maintain, and scale the CMS. Enable your marketing team to update website + app content without needing you. Try the #1 rated SaaS Headless CMS for your JS app today. Free for 30 days.

🧈 ButterCMS sponsor

🗣 Is TypeScript Worth It? — Time saver or waste of time? The relationship between TypeScript and JavaScript remains a complex one. An extensive discussion took place on Hacker News this week and, notably, TypeScript PM Daniel Rosenwasser popped up to respond to some of the concerns.

Hacker News

IN BRIEF:

You’ll be aware of JavaScript’s strict mode but one developer thinks we need a stricter mode to fix several other syntax issues.

Publint is an online tool for ‘linting’ live npm packages to see if they are packaged correctly, as a way to ensure maximum compatibility across environments.

RELEASES:

Node v19.4.0 and v18.13.0 (LTS)

Commander.js 9.5
↳ Node.js command-line interface toolkit.

Angular 15.1

Pixi.js 7.1 – Fast 2D on WebGL engine.

📒 Articles & Tutorials

The Gotcha of Unhandled Promise Rejections — A rough edge with promises that can sneak up on you. Jake looks at a ‘gotcha’ around unhandled promise rejections and how to work around it.

Jake Archibald

HTML with Superpowers: The Guidebook — A free resource introducing Web Components, what they are, and what problems they’re trying to solve. You can see the Guidebook directly here.

Dave Rupert

With Retool You Ship Apps Fast with 100+ Perfectly Crafted UI Components — The fast way for devs to build and share internal tools. Teams at companies like Amazon, DoorDash & NBC collaborate around custom-built Retool apps to solve internal workflows.

Retool sponsor

Everything About React’s ‘Concurrent Mode’ Features — An in-depth, example-led exploration of Concurrent Mode (now more a set of features integrated into React 18 than a distinct ‘mode’).

Henrique Yuji

Using GitHub Copilot for Unit Testing? — Even if you find the idea of a AI tool like Copilot writing production code distasteful, it may have a place in speeding up writing tests.

Ianis Triandafilov

How to Destructure Props in Vue (Composition API) — How to correctly destructure props object in a Vue component while maintaining the reactivity.

Dmitri Pavlutin

Using Inline JavaScript Modules to Prevent CSS Blockage

Stoyan Stefanov

How to Build a GraphQL Server with Deno

Andy Jiang

🛠 Code & Tools

Gluon: Framework for Creating Desktop Apps from Sites — A new approach for building desktop apps on Windows and Linux from Web sites using Node (or Deno) and already installed browsers (Chromium or Firefox). Initial macOS support has just been added too.

Gluon

Structura.js: Lightweight Library for Immutable State Management — ” It is based on the idea of structural sharing. The library is very similar to Immer.js, but it has some advantages over it.”

Giuseppe Raso

Tuple, a Lightning-Fast Pairing Tool Built for Remote Developers — High-resolution, crystal-clear screen sharing, low-latency remote control, and less CPU usage than you’d think possible.

Tuple sponsor

Bay.js: A Lightweight Library for Web Components — Makes it easy to create web components that can be reused across projects. It also boasts performant state changes and secure event binding.

Ian Dunkerley

Twify: Scaffold a Tailwind CSS Project with a Single Command — You can use your preferred package manager and it supports creating projects with Next.js, Nuxt 2/3, SvelteKit, Remix, Angular, and more.

Kazi Ahmed

Lazy Brush 2.0: A Library for Smooth Pointer Drawing — Allow your users to draw smooth curves and straight lines with your mouse, finger or any pointing device. This long standing library has just migrated to TypeScript and gained a new ‘friction’ option to customize the feel. GitHub repo.

Jan Hug

➗ Mafs: React Components for Interactive Math — Build interactive, animated visualizations using declarative code with illustrative demos like bezier curves. The documentation is fantastic – check out how easy it is to make plots. Or just head to the GitHub repo.

Steven Petryk

Are You Looking for a New Observability Tool?

TelemetryHub by Scout sponsor

Hyphenopoly 5.0: A Polyfill for Client-Side Hyphenation — An interesting use of WebAssembly here.

Mathias Nater

visx 3.0
↳ D3-powered visualization React components.

Atrament 3.0
↳ Library for drawing and handwriting on a canvas element.

HLS.js 1.3
↳ Library to play HLS (HTTP Live Streaming) in browsers, with MSE support.

💻 Jobs

Developer Relations Manager — Join the CKEditor team to build community around an Open Source project used by millions of users around the world 🚀

CKEditor

Backend Engineer, TypeScript (Berlin / Remote) — Thousands of people love our product (see Trustpilot for yourself). Join the team behind it and help us scale. 🚀

Feather

Find JavaScript Jobs with Hired — Create a profile on Hired to connect with hiring managers at growing startups and Fortune 500 companies. It’s free for job-seekers.

Hired

🎶 Écoute la musique..

Oxygene Pt 4, as Performed by JavaScript — This is fun. Dittytoy is a simple, JavaScript-powered online generative music tool and someone has put together a surprisingly faithful rendition of perhaps one of the best known instrumental synth songs ever, all the way from 1976.

Dittytoy

NODE.JS Retro 2022

Posted on by Simon Helberg

Node.js was the top technology used by professional developers in 2022

Stack Overflow’s annual Developer Survey confirmed our experience; Node.js continues to grow its use across the globe due to its scalability and performance as well as its ability to integrate seamlessly with a wide range of technologies and databases make it an ideal technology for businesses of all sizes.

The Node.js open-source project, a cross-platform JavaScript run-time environment built on Chrome’s V8 JavaScript engine, allows developers to use JavaScript to create web applications and serve data quickly, securely, and reliably. That’s why professional developers have adopted it broadly; it helps them in many web-development tasks like API development, streaming, and web and mobile applications as it is fully compatible with existing JavaScript libraries (the Top Language according to Github’s Octoverse Report, it can be used to create highly scalable and dynamic web or mobile applications.

Img 1: Stackoverflow 2022 survey

NodeJS on an Enterprise Level

Node.js excels at simplifying the development process for enterprises. It requires less code to execute tasks, allowing developers to focus on creating high-quality code rather than endless lines of coding. By utilizing asynchronous I/O and non-blocking event-driven input/output makes it lightweight and efficient for building real-time applications.

Img: Node.js Org Use Survey

Node.js is designed to handle high amounts of requests quickly and efficiently. Its architecture is based on a single-threaded, event-driven model that makes it very efficient at handling concurrent requests. This event-driven design allows Node to handle requests without the need for multiple threads. This makes Node.js applications highly scalable, as multiple requests can be served without additional resources or server hardware.

Additionally, Node.js supports streaming and event-based programming, which allows developers to build asynchronous applications. Asynchronous programming will enable applications to respond quickly to multiple requests without waiting for each request to finish before responding.

Therefore the performance of Node.js applications depends mainly on how well they are coded and optimized. Careful planning and optimizing the application code are essential to achieve high performance. Additionally, Node.js applications benefit from caching, clustering, and other optimization techniques. These techniques can help improve the performance and scalability of Node.js applications.

The number one request we get at NodeSource is to help developers and organizations improve the performance of their Node.js applications. It’s a key reason we built our product N|Solid, to provide the visibility and insights to help identify and resolve issues fast without adding overhead like other APMs (NodeSource Benchmark Tool). And why we offer Professional Services from our Node Experts to go a step further with Performance Audits and Training and Node.js Support.

Optimization techniques in Node.js

In our experience, the most common optimization techniques in Node.js are caching, minification, bundling, optimizing database queries, code splitting, using async functions, and using the Node.js cluster module. Here is a quick overview of each.:

Caching

Caching in Node.js helps improve performance by storing data in memory to be accessed quickly when needed. This helps reduce the time it takes to retrieve data from the server and helps reduce the number of requests needed to be made to the server. Caching also allows data to be stored more efficiently, which is helpful for applications with large amounts of data.

Minification

In Node.js reduces the size of code files and other resources by removing unnecessary characters, such as spaces, new lines, and comments, without altering the code’s functionality. Minifying code can help to enhance the performance of your Node.js applications by reducing download time and improving browser rendering speed.

Bundling

Is the process of combining multiple files or resources into one bundle, which typically has a smaller file size than when all files are separate. Bundling can reduce network latency as fewer requests are needed to retrieve data. It also helps improve application performance as the browser can cache a single large file instead of multiple small ones.

Optimizing database queries

In Node.js involves utilizing techniques such as indexing, query optimization, and caching to ensure that database queries are more efficient and run more quickly. Proper indexing can contribute to faster query times. In contrast, query optimization can reduce the time needed to process a query by ensuring that only the data required is requested from the database.

Code splitting

Is a technique to reduce the amount of code sent to the client when a web page is requested. Code splitting efficiently divides code into smaller bundles and only sends the necessary code to the user when needed. This helps improve web application performance, as the user only needs to download the relevant code for the requested page.

Async functions

In Node.js allow code to be run asynchronously, meaning that the code is not executed sequentially. Instead, asynchronous operations can be executed in parallel and execute operations concurrently. This allows the code to execute faster and in a more efficient way. Additionally, asynchronous functions provide better error-handling capabilities and allow greater control over the flow.

Use of the Node.js Cluster Module

The Node.js cluster module allows you to create a group of child processes (workers) that all share the same server port, making it easy to scale your application across multiple CPU cores. It also provides a powerful way to handle requests in a distributed manner and makes it easier to manage and monitor the performance of your application. The cluster also provides an API for sending messages between workers, allowing them to coordinate their activities.

In addition to these optimization techniques in Node.js, it is important to consider the best development practices in Node.js.

The best development practices in Node.js.for 2023

Img: https://xkcd.com/292/

The list includes, but is not less:

Utilizing the latest version of Node.js and ensuring it is regularly updated. For your production binaries, we recommend using our distribution packages (best maintained, documented, and most used production binaries -NodeSource Node.js Binary Distributions

Implementing modern patterns and techniques such as asynchronous programming and proper error handling.

Leveraging dependency management to reduce code complexity and ensure packages are up-to-date.

Adopting modular development practices to create easily reused and scaled components across projects.

Investing in automated testing to ensure quality and stability in the codebase.

Use security libraries to prevent common vulnerabilities and protect against data breaches.

Optimizing memory and resource usage to keep operating costs low.

And to comply with one or several of these good practices, it is essential to use an APM.

Using an Application Performance Monitoring (APM)

Using an Application Performance Monitoring (APM) tool to monitor your Node.js application lets you gain insights into application performance and identify issues quickly. Some popular APM tools for Node.js include New Relic, AppDynamics, Datadog and N|Solid. Each tool offers performance monitoring, error tracking, and real-time analytics features.

Note: Last year, we released for the community an open-source tool to compare the main APMs in Node.js; we invite you to contribute or use it in your work.

Selecting the right APM for Node.js will depend on the specific needs of your project. However (yes, we are biased 🙂), we believe N|Solid is the best APM for Node.js is the best APM for Node.js; because it provides developers with deeper insights and key integrations and adds security features no other APM can.

Conclusion:

Node.js is quickly becoming a popular choice for enterprise-level applications. With its lightweight architecture, scalability, and flexibility,
Node.js is an ideal language for businesses that need applications that can handle high traffic and complex data.
Node.js allows organizations to develop highly-customizable web applications that are secure, reliable, and perform well at scale.
Node.js also has a vibrant open-source community, allowing developers to easily find and use existing libraries and frameworks.

Are you creating a Node.js application?

Follow these simple steps:

Start by selecting a framework. Node.js has many available frameworks, such as Fastify, Hapi, or Koa. Choose the one that best fits the needs of your application.

Set up a package.json file to better manage your project’s dependencies.
Create a folder structure to organize the components of your application.
Structure your code into separate files as your application grows.
Write automated tests for your application.
Implement error handling for any unexpected issues.
Validate user input before handing it off to your application.
Utilize caching to improve performance.
Consider deploying
Use an APM and follow our diagnostic blog-post series (Remember that for Node.js, N|Solid is the recommended option 😉 ).

Good programming could help create a project exactly how you want. In NodeJS, there are so many open-source projects to take inspiration from.

— Wait for our list of projects and technologies in Node.js to keep an eye on in 2023 —

With services from a NodeJS expert company such as NodeSource, you could make the most of the technology’s robust features to achieve your web development goals. We will be happy to support you in your node.js journey!

Here are our channels to follow us and continue the conversation:
– Twitter
– LinkedIn
– Github.
As always, the best place to contact us is via our website or [email protected].

About N|Solid

N|Solid is an augmented version of Node.js that includes additional features such as security, performance monitoring, and enhanced debugging tools. It’s an excellent option for projects that require robust debugging and performance capabilities.