#661 — November 2, 2023
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.”
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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