Tag: HTML

jQuery lives on; major changes teased

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#​639 — May 18, 2023

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JavaScript Weekly

Bun’s New Bundler: 220x Faster than webpack? — Bun is one of the newest JavaScript runtimes (built atop the JavaScriptCore engine) and focuses on speed while aiming to be a drop-in replacement for Node.js. This week’s v0.6.0 release is the ‘biggest release yet’ with standalone executable generation and more, but its new JavaScript bundler and minifier may attract most of the attention and this post digs into why.

Jarred Sumner

???? If you’d prefer to read what a third party thinks, Shane O’Sullivan gave the new bundler a spin and shared his thoughts. There’s also some discussion on Hacker News. It’s early days and while esbuild may be fast enough for most right now, it’s fantastic to see any progress in bundling.

Deopt Explorer: A VS Code Extension to Inspect V8 Trace Log Info — A thorough introduction to MS’s new tool for performing analysis of the V8 engine’s internals, including CPU profile data, how inline caches operate, deoptimizations, how functions were run (interpreted or compiled) and more. There’s a lot going on.

Ron Buckton (Microsoft)

Supercharge Your Websites and Applications with Cloudflare — Get ready for supercharged speed and reliability with Cloudflare’s suite of performance tools. With ultra-fast CDN, smart traffic routing, media optimization, and more, Cloudflare has everything you need to ensure your site or app runs at peak performance.

Cloudflare sponsor

jQuery 3.7.0 Released — JavaScript Weekly is 638 issues old, or almost 13 years once you take away weeks off, so jQuery was a big deal in our early days. We hold a lot of nostalgia for it, and it remains widely used even if no-one is writing about it anymore ???? v3.7 folds the Sizzle selector engine into the core, adds some unitless CSS properties, gains a new uniqueSort method, and “major changes” are still promised in future. jQuery lives on!

Timmy Willison (jQuery Foundation)

⚡️ IN BRIEF:

TC39’s Hemanth.HM has begun keeping a list of ES2023 code examples like he did for ES2022, ES2021, and ES2020.

???? The New Stack has a story about Meta supporting the OpenJS Foundation – but who wrote the article is what we found more interesting..

The folks at Meta / Facebook have written about the efficiency gains made in Messenger Desktop by moving from Electron to React Native.

One downside to platforms like Cloudflare Workers using V8 isolates has been a lack of support for opening TCP sockets – quite an impediement if you want to talk to a RDBMS over TCP or something. Fear no more, Cloudflare Workers has introduced a connect() API for creating TCP sockets from Workers functions.

Promise.withResolvers progressed to stage 2 at the latest TC39 meeting.

RELEASES:

Node.js 20.2

Rome 12.1
↳ The formatter/linter gains stage 3 decorator support.

Ember.js 5.0 – App framework.

Jasmine 5.0 – Testing framework.

Gatsby 5.10

???? Articles & Tutorials

How to Get Full Type Support with Plain JavaScript — It’s possible to reap the benefits of TypeScript, yet still write plain JavaScript, as TypeScript’s analyzer understands types written in the JSDoc format.

Pausly

TypeScript’s own JS Projects Utilizing TypeScript page has more info on the different levels of strictness you can follow from mere inference on regular JS code through to full on TypeScript with strict enabled.

▶  Coding a Working Game of Chess in Pure JavaScript — No canvas, either. All using the DOM, SVG, and JavaScript. No AI and it’s not perfect, but it’s only 88 minutes long and it’ll give you something to work on..

Ania Kubow

Automate Slack and MS Teams Notifications Using Node.js — Quick guide to send and automate messages via Slack, MS Teams, and any other channel from your Node.js applications.

Courier.com sponsor

Your Jest Tests Might Be Wrong — Is your Jest test suite failing you? You might not be using the testing framework’s full potential, especially when it comes to preventing state leakage between tests.

Jamie Magee

A Guide to Visual Regression Testing with Playwright — The Playwright browser control library can form the basis of an end-to-end testing mechanism all written in JavaScript, and comparing the visual output of tests can help show where things are going wrong.

Dima Ivashchuk (Lost Pixel)

Create a Real Time Multi Host Video Chat in a Browser with Amazon IVS

Amazon Web Services (AWS) sponsor

React Server Components, Next.js App Router and Examples — Addy Osmani’s overview of of the state of React Server Components, the Next.js App Router implementation, other implementations, the move towards hybrid rendering, plus related links.

Addy Osmani

..and if React is your thing, the latest issue of React Status is for you.

???? Code & Tools

VanJS: A 1.2KB Reactive UI Framework Without JSX — A new entrant to an increasingly crowded space, VanJS is particularly light and elegant, and its author has put some serious effort into documenting it and offering tools to convert your HTML to its custom format. It’s short for vanilla JavaScript, by the way.. GitHub repo.

Tao Xin

JavaScript Scratchpad for VS Code (2m+ Downloads) — Quokka.js is the #1 tool for exploring/testing JavaScript with edit-continue experience to see realtime execution and runtime values.

Wallaby.js sponsor

Introducing Legend-State 1.0: Faster State for React — Another state management solution? After a year of effort, Legend State 1.0 claims to be the fastest option “on just about every metric” and they have the benchmarks to prove it. Whatever the case, this thorough intro is worth a look. GitHub repo.

Moo․do

Starry Night: GitHub-Like Syntax Highlighting — Apparently, GitHub’s own syntax highlighting approach isn’t open source, but this takes a similar approach and is. It’s admittedly quite ‘heavy’ (due to using a WASM build of the Oniguruma regex engine) but that’s the price of quality.

Titus Wormer

Garph 0.5: A Fullstack GraphQL Framework for TypeScript — Full-stack ‘batteries included’ GraphQL APIs without codegen. GitHub repo.

Step CI

headless-qr: A Simple, Modern QR Code Library — A slimmer adaptation of an older project without the extra code that isn’t necessary today. Turning the binary into an image is your job, or use something like QRCode.js if you want a canvas-rendered QR code out of the box.

Rich Harris

Scroll Btween: Use Scroll Position to Tween CSS Values on DOM Elements — Scrolling/parallax libraries tend to feel the same but this one demonstrates some diverse examples with colors, images, and text — all with no dependencies.

Olivier Blanc

eslint-plugin-check-file: Rules for Consistent Filename and Folder Names — Allows you to enforce a consistent naming pattern for file and directory names in projects.

Huan

Transformers.js 2.0 – Run Hugging Face transformers directly in browser.

PrimeReact 9.4 – Extensive UI component library.

The Lounge 4.4 – Cross-platform, self-hosted web IRC client.

Faast.js 8.0 – Serverless batch computing made simple.

???? 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

Fullstack Engineer at Everfund.com — Push code, change lives! Help us become the center for good causes on the modern web with our dev tools.

Everfund

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

???? Go with the flow..

js2flowchart.js — A visualization library to convert JavaScript code into attractive SVG flowcharts. Luckily, there’s a live online version if you want to play without having to install anything.

Bohdan Liashenko

Did you know JavaScript is trademarked?

Posted on by

#​636 — April 27, 2023

Read on the Web

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.

htmx 1.9.1

Playwright 1.33

Transformers: JavaScript in Disguise

Posted on by

#​630 — March 17, 2023

Read on the Web

JavaScript Weekly

????  Transformers.js: Running ML Models in the Browser — Transformers are a type of machine learning model often used for natural language or visual processing and while running such models directly in the browser is in its infancy, Transformers.js opens up some ML models to you with some impressive demos here.

Xenova

????  Celebrating 10 Years of Electron — It feels like Electron pops up everywhere (Slack, Spotify, VS Code, and more) so it might feel surprising it’s only been with us for a decade. Slack and Electron developer Erick Zhao gives thanks to Electron’s developers, the community, gives us a bit of Electron related history, and reassures us Electron is still going strong.

Erick Zhao

Dynaboard: A Visual Web App IDE Made for Developers — Build high performance public and private web applications in a collaborative — full-stack — development environment.

Dynaboard sponsor

Announcing TypeScript 5.0 — Note that TypeScript doesn’t follow semantic versioning, so this is as much a ‘major’ release as 4.9 was.. but 5.0 looks cool anyway. This release of the typed JavaScript superset is packed with features like decorators, improved ESM project support for Node and bundlers, const type parameters, and more.

Daniel Rosenwasser (Microsoft)

Turbowatch: File Change Detector and Task Orchestrator — Not just that but it claims to be extremely fast and “if you ever wanted something like Nodemon but more capable, then you are at the right place.” This looks very promising and the README is full of examples.

Gajus Kuizinas

IN BRIEF:

BREAKING NEWS: The JS Party podcast has just dropped an episode called ▶️ The Future of React – so new, we haven’t listened to it, but it features Dan Abramov and Joe Savona so may make for good weekend listening..

“The most dangerous command you run every day: npm install” says Socket, who are introducing what they call ‘safe npm’, a transparent wrapper around npm designed to, well, make it less dangerous.

CORRECTION: In issue 627 we suggested the ECMAScript 2023 spec had entered a new draft stage. TC39 member Jordan Harband pointed out to us that it has been in such a state for some time. “There’s still a stage 4 PR not yet merged,” he noted, but there will be some progress in the next month.

Defer is a new ‘zero-infrastructure’ background jobs platform for Node.js apps.

Recently we linked to ???? Dittytoy, a fun online JavaScript environment for audio coding/experiments. Someone has somehow implemented an entire Commodore 64 SID synthesizer in it!

????  Developer Day: A Front-Row Seat to What’s New with Retool

Retool sponsor

RELEASES:

Node.js v19.8.0/1 (Current)

Jasmine 4.6
↳ Testing framework for browsers and Node.

pm2 5.3
↳ Popular Node production process manager.

Mongoose 7.0
↳ Popular MongoDB ODM for Node.js.

ESLint 8.36

???? Articles & Tutorials

Chrome 111 Gains a ‘View Transition’ Feature for SPAs — The View Transition API is only supported by Chrome so far, but allows easy animated page transitions within single-page apps (demo here). Luckily it suits progressive enhancement so you can start using it right now without feeling too guilty 😉 Multi-page app support is forthcoming.

Jake Archibald (Chrome Developers)

Create and Download Text Files with JavaScript — If you want your code to be able to generate a text (such as JSON) file on the fly and have it downloaded by the user’s browser, it’s reasonably easy.

Amit Merchant

Five Mistakes I Made When Starting My First React Project — Richard shares his early React mistakes with the hope you can learn from his misfortunes. He tackles topics like using defaultProps, propTypes, and class components.

Richard Oliver Bray

Too Much Tech Debt in Your node_modules? Our Team of JS Devs Can Help — We are a team of senior software engineers who specialize in tech debt. Let us modernize your JavaScript stack ????

UpgradeJS.com | JavaScript Upgrade Services sponsor

Progressively Enhancing a Table with a Web Component — Building a web component wrapper to add table sorting.

Raymond Camden

Shell-Free Node.js Scripting with Execa 7.1 — Execa is a popular process execution library for Node and the latest version includes an interesting $ method feature for writing zx-style scripts with it, making it even more useful for shell scripting style usecases.

ehmicky

What is Vite and Why Use It Over Create React App?

Luke Twomey

Pointers on Upgrading from Cypress v9 to v12

Gleb Bahmutov

How to Use v-model with Form Inputs in Vue

Dmitri Pavlutin

How to Create and Use Path Aliases in TypeScript Imports with Vite

Hasibul Hasan

What Is Deno and How to Use Its Sandbox?

Roman Zaynetdinov

???? Code & Tools

Template: A Simple Framework for Webapps — The author built it for his own projects, but notes: “It’s a joy to work in, feels “frameworky” but it’s just web standards with <100 lines of convenience JS wrapped around it. There is no magic beyond what the browser provides – I like it that way.” We do too.

William Blankenship

React ProseMirror: Integrate the ProseMirror Editor with React — ProseMirror is a toolkit for building rich text editors for the Web.

The New York Times

Breakpoints and console.log Is the Past, Time Travel Is the Future — 15x faster JavaScript debugging than with breakpoints and console.log, now with support for Vitest.

Wallaby.js sponsor

Fable 4.0: F# to JavaScript Compiler — If you fancy F#’s flavor of almost-entirely-functional development, this could be for you. GitHub repo.

Fable

MiniSearch: Small In-Memory Fulltext Search Engine for Browser and Node — The strength is that the indexed data is stored locally, allowing it to work offline and giving good performance, as seen in this demo.

Luca Ongaro

css-variable: Tiny Treeshakable Library to Define CSS Custom Properties in JS — Compatible with popular CSS-in-JS libraries like Emotion, styled-components, Linaria, etc., and it boasts better CSS minification and smaller virtual DOM updates, among other features.

Jan Nicklas

Tremor 2.0: The React Library to Build Dashboards Fast — Provides an array of modular components to build data-driven dashboards. v2.0 is the “first step towards a production-ready version of Tremor” and sees a full switch to Tailwind CSS. Homepage.

Tremor Labs

Stable Diffusion Plugin for Photoshop — Writing code that worked with Adobe’s weird JS variant was ghastly, but this uses their new ‘UXP’ based approach, so is interesting enough for that alone. This plugin also opens up the Stable Diffusion generative art system to Photoshop users.

Abdullah Alfaraj

Flexboard: A React Component Library for Resizable Sidebars — Try the live example. The code allows you to set min/max sizes for the resizable parts of the layout.

Dorbus

???? Jobs

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

Software Engineer (Frontend) — Join our “kick ass” team. Our software team operates from 17 countries and we’re always looking for more exceptional engineers.

Sticker Mule

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.

Fuite 2.0
↳ Tool for finding memory leaks in web apps.

???? wavesurfer.js 6.6
↳ Navigable waveform built on Web Audio & canvas.

Svelte-Inview 4.0
↳ Svelte action that monitors when an element enters/leaves the viewport.

Discord.js 14.8
↳ Library for using the Discord chat API.

Plotly.js 2.20
↳ Powerful charting library. (Examples.)

Recharts 2.5
↳ React + D3 charting library. (Examples.)

deepmerge 4.3.1
↳ Merges the enumerable properties of objects.

Vue Testing Library 7.0

React Table Library 4.1

JavaScript sans build systems?

Posted on by

#​626 — February 17, 2023

Read on the Web

JavaScript Weekly

Writing JavaScript Without a Build System — Using a variety of build tools for things like bundling and transpiling is reasonably standard in modern JavaScript development, but what if you want to keep things simple? For simple things, it’s not necessary, says Julia. This led to a lot of discussion on Hacker News.

Julia Evans

Ryan Dahl, Node.js Creator, Wants to Rebuild the Runtime of the Web — A neat bit of journalism about the alternative JavaScript runtime Deno and what Ryan Dahl is trying to achieve with it and how Ryan handled the stress of being known as the creator of Node.js.

Harry Spitzer / Sequoia

Broadcasting a Live Stream With Nothing but JavaScript — Live streams typically use third-party software to broadcast, but with Amazon Interactive Video Service, you can build a powerful, interactive broadcasting interface with the Web Broadcast SDK and JavaScript. Click here to learn more.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) sponsor

core-js’s Maintainer Complains Open Source Is ‘Broken’ — core-js is a popular universal polyfill for JavaScript features and its author has run into his fair share of bad luck which has culminated in this lengthy post on the state of the project, his issues in securing an income and, well, the downsides to living in Russia. The Register has tried to balance out the story.

The Register

IN BRIEF:

🐒 The just released Firefox 110 for Android now supports Tampermonkey, an extension for running JavaScript ‘userscripts’ on sites you visit.

The Angular project is taking steps to revamp its reactivity model to enable fine-grained change detection via signals.

The latest beta of iOS and iPadOS 16.4 supports the Web Push API for home screen webapps.

🐦 A fun Twitter thread where Qwik’s Miško Hevery attempted to demonstrate why a = 0-x is about 3-10x faster than a = -x before being told about a flaw in his benchmark. There is still a performance difference, though.

▶️ The React.js documentary we mentioned last week has now been released and it’s a heck of a watch – you’ll need 78 minutes of your time though.

RELEASES:

Node.js 19.6.1, 18.14.1, 16.19.1 and 14.21.3.

JavaScript Obfuscator 4.0 – Code scrambler.

Shoelace 2.1
↳ Framework agnostic Web components.

Mermaid 9.4
↳ Text to diagram generator. Now with timeline diagram support.

Cypress 12.6

📒 Articles & Tutorials

Use a MutationObserver to Handle DOM Nodes that Don’t Exist Yet — Comparing the effectiveness of the MutationObserver API with the conventional method of constantly checking for the creation of nodes.

Alex MacArthur

Well-Known Symbols in JavaScript — Hemanth, a TC39 delegate, shows off 14 symbols and where they can come in useful.

Hemanth HM

🚀 Monitor and Optimize Website Speed to Rank Higher in Google — Monitor Google’s Core Web Vitals and optimize performance using in-depth reports built for developers. Improve SEO & UX.

DebugBear sponsor

Why to Use Maps More and Objects Less — A journey down a performance rabbit hole.

Steve Sewell

Adopting React in the Early Days — A personal history lesson providing context around React’s evolution. While React might be an obvious, even safe, choice now, that wasn’t always true.

Sébastien Lorber

An Animated Flythrough with Theatre.js and React Three Fiber — How to fly through a 3D scene using the Theatre.js JavaScript animation library and the React Three Fiber 3D renderer. This is the sort of thing that used to be Very Difficult™ but is now relatively trivial.

Andrew Prifer (Codrops)

How to Change the Tab Bar Color Dynamically with JavaScript

Amit Merchant

Is Deno Ready for Primetime? One Dev’s Opinion

Max Countryman

Using Playwright to Monitor Third-Party Resources That Could Impact User Experience

Stefan Judis

🛠 Code & Tools

Dependency Cruiser: Validate and Visualize JavaScript Dependencies — If you want a look at the output, there’s a whole page of graphs for popular, real world projects including Chalk, Yarn, and React.

Sander Verweij

Devalue: Like JSON.stringify, But.. — “Gets the job done when JSON.stringify can’t.” Namely, it can handle cyclical and repeated references, regular expressions, Map and Set, custom types, and more.

Rich Harris

🧡 JavaScript Scratchpad for VS Code (2m+ Downloads) — Get Quokka.js ‘Community’ for free: #1 tool for exploring/testing JavaScript with edit-continue experience to see realtime execution and runtime values.

Wallaby.js sponsor

NodeGUI: Build Native Cross-Platform Desktop Apps with Node.js — Unlike Electron which leans upon webviews and HTML, NodeGui uses a Qt based approach. This week’s 0.58.0 release is the first stable release based on Qt 6 and offering high DPI support.

NodeGui

DOMPurify 3.0: Fast, Tolerant XSS Sanitizer for HTML and SVG — A project that’s nine years old today but still actively developed. Supports all modern browsers (IE support was only just dropped) and is heavily tested. There’s a live demo here.

Cure53

Pythagora: Generate Express Integration Tests by Recording Activity — This is a neat idea still in its early stages. Add a line of code after setting up an Express.js app and this will capture app usage and generate integration tests based on the interactions. (▶️ Screencast demo.)

zvone187 and LeonOstrez

Try Stream’s Free Trial of SDKs for In-App Chat

Stream sponsor

grep.app: Search Code Across a Half Million GitHub Repos — A code search engine that lets you use regexes or syntax in your search. Considering what it is, it’s pretty fast and has an extensive index (over half a million public repos from GitHub, allegedly).

grep.app

tsParticles: Particles, Confetti and Fireworks for Your Pages — Create customizable particle related effects for use on the Web. Uses the regular 2D canvas for broad support.

Matteo Bruni

💻 Jobs

Software Engineer — Join our happy team. Stimulus is a social platform started by Sticker Mule to show what’s possible if your mission is to increase human happiness.

Stimulus

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

QUICK RELEASES:

Minimatch 6.2
↳ Glob matcher library, as used in npm.
    minimatch(“bar.foo”, “*.foo”)

React Accordion 1.2
↳ Unstyled WAI-ARIA-compliant accordion library.

ScrollTrigger 1.0.6
↳ Have your page react to scroll changes.

VeeValidate 4.7.4
↳ Popular Vue.js form library

Express Admin 2.0
↳ Admin interface for data in MySQL/Postgres/SQLite.

Execa 7.0
↳ Improved process execution from Node.js.

React Tooltip 5.8

Why document.write() is bad

Posted on by

#​622 — January 20, 2023

Read on the Web

JavaScript Weekly

Why Not document.write()? — Many moons ago, document.write was a mainstay of client-side JavaScript code, but it’s long been considered a bad practice – why? Harry digs in, noting that it “guarantees both a blocking fetch and a blocking execution, which holds up the parser for far longer than necessary”.

Harry Roberts

New: The WebAssembly JavaScript Promise Integration API — A technical explanation from the V8 team on a new API to let WebAssembly apps bridge the synchronous / asynchronous gap of expectations around external functionality (consider that many apps are written synchronously, but modern Web APIs are usually asynchronous). JSPI helps bridge both worlds and can be tested via a flag in Chrome.

McCabe, Michaud, Rezvov, Dahl / V8 Team

Break the Programming Mold with Dependency Injection — Keep your code on the cutting edge with dependency injection in JavaScript. Check out Snyk’s guide that gives a breakdown of what dependency injection is, when you should use it, and what popular JavaScript frameworks it’s implemented.

Snyk sponsor

Why Is My Jest Suite So Slow? — Jest is known for its speed and simplicity so the author was surprised at how quickly his team’s test suite was slowing down. This is a write up of the ensuing investigation along with the improvements that slashed test running time.

Steven Lemon

Bun v0.5 Released — Bun is another JavaScript runtime taking the world by storm and a level of Node compatibility has been baked in from the start. v0.5 adds support for node:readline, workspaces, a node:dns shim, and network socket creation support such that more Node.js-based database libraries work out of the box.

Ashcon Partovi

IN BRIEF:

The ▶️ latest episode of the JS Party podcast tackles ‘the rise and fall’ of JavaScript frameworks and the modern trend towards smaller ones.

The folks at NodeSource have put together a top 10 list of Node open-source projects ‘to keep an eye on’ in 2023.

Aurelia 2 is now in beta.

RELEASES:

⭐️ esbuild 0.17.0
↳ Popular bundler. Note that this is a key release with backwards incompatible changes.

Inertia.js 1.0
↳ Build SPAs for any backend.

React Native 0.71

Remix 1.10.0
↳ Popular full stack framework.

📒 Articles & Tutorials

🎨  Building an Accessible Theme Picker — An attractively presented, easy to follow tutorial for a handy site feature.

Sarah L. Fossheim

Fixing a Memory Leak in a Production Node.js App — Kent encountered a variety of weird memory and CPU usage spikes in his Node-powered app and decided to figure out what was going on. This post walks through his complete journey, with plenty of side problems encountered along the way, before discovering the root cause was where he least expected it.

Kent C Dodds

Build a Mobile-Responsive Telehealth Pager App Using Stream’s Chat API — Build a responsive chat app with emojis/reactions, built-in GIF support, ability to edit/delete messages, direct & group chat, and more.

Stream sponsor

📊  A Beginner’s Guide to Chrome Tracing — For when you want to go deeper than the Performance tab. With tracing, you can record what a browser is up to far behind the scenes.

Nolan Lawson

Handling Errors Like a Pro in TypeScript — “Learn the design pattern I use to handle errors and write cleaner code.”

Kolby Sisk

A Beginner’s Guide to async/await with Examples

James Hibbard

10 Mistakes to Avoid When Starting with Vue 3

Fotis Adamakis

🛠 Code & Tools

RoughNotation: Cute Animated ‘Rough’ Text Annotations — Uses Rough.js (itself a project worth checking out) to get a hand-drawn look. Lots of nice interactive examples on the page showing a variety of annotation styles (boxes, underlines, circles..)

Preet Shihn

Free Website Speed Test: Does Your Site Meet Google’s Core Web Vitals? — Get an in-depth technical analysis of your site and learn how to make it fast. Rank higher in Google & deliver great UX.

DebugBear sponsor

Modern Errors: Handle Errors in a Simple, Stable, Consistent Way — Create error classes, wrap or aggregate errors, or use one of several plugins to do things like print bug reporting info, print stack traces, or more. Happy in both Node and the browser.

ehmicky

Shifty: A Small, Fast Tweening Engine — All it does is tweening. It’s a low level animation solution that you can integrate into any rendering mechanism of your choice. The examples here demonstrate it well as it can be used for ‘animating’ things in an unconventional sense. GitHub repo.

Jeremy Kahn

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

De Rosa, Michel, et al.

Rete.js 1.5: A Framework for Visual Programming — Create a node-based editor in the browser and apply logic. Check out these demos on CodePen. GitHub repo.

Vitaliy Stoliarov

Don’t Let Your Issue Tracker Be a Four-Letter Word. Use Shortcut

Shortcut (formerly Clubhouse.io) sponsor

gpu-io: GPU-Accelerated Computing Library — for physics simulations and other mathematical calculations. A neat look at the power of WebGL. Several examples.

Amanda Ghassaei

Chart.js 4.2
↳ Simple Canvas-based charts. (Samples.)

Serialize JavaScript 6.0.1
↳ Serialize JS to a JSON superset.

axios-retry 3.4
↳ Axios plugin that retries failed requests.

Axios 1.2.3 – Popular HTTP client library.

Commander.js 10.0 – Node.js CLIs made easy.

Mineflayer 4.7 – JS API for Minecraft bots.

Wretch 2.4 – Fetch API wrapper with niceties.

💻 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

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

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