Tag: libraries

Web Components forever?

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#​660 — October 26, 2023

Read on the Web

JavaScript Weekly

Transformers.js 2.7: ML for the Web, Now with Text-to-Speech — Transformers.js provides access to machine learning models directly in the browser for all sorts of tasks and v2.7 introduces audio generation (live demo.) The Web Speech API remains the natural choice for this task for now, but the ML approach will only continue to offer greater opportunities over time.

Joshua Lochner

🔥  Web Components Will Outlive Your JavaScript Framework — It’s a spicy opinion piece but I think Jake has earned the right after his fantastic posts on CRDTs in which he focused on using vanilla JS web components rather than a system like React. Here, he explains why.

Jake Lazaroff

🗣 Jake’s post fuelled an extensive Hacker News discussion touching on everything from MDX and htmx‘s role, to state management and the ‘shallow’ nature of the Web Components API as-is.

Production Ready Postgres at Your Fingertips — Deploy a faster and more reliable Postgres cluster. Run in the cloud of your choice with management, backups, and production features handled for you. Get started with less than 5 minutes. Try it today.

Crunchy Bridge sponsor

Yarn 4.0 Released — Starting life as an npm alternative that resolved several of its major pain points, Yarn remains a popular choice and v4 introduces a new ‘hardened mode’ to protect you from various security issues, boasts an improved constraints engine, and has performance (almost) on par with pnpm.

Maël Nison

Node v21.1 (Current) Released with ESM Detection Feature — “The new flag –experimental-detect-module can be used to automatically run ES modules when their syntax can be detected. … We hope to make detection enabled by default in a future version..”

Michaël Zasso

🐦 The React team has announced the much anticipated Server Actions and Client Actions features are now available in React Canary.

📣 The Angular team is cooking up something big with Angular 17. Minko Gechev has teased a long, forthcoming release post and they’re encouraging us all to set a notification for Nov 6’s ▶️ live streamed ‘Special Angular Event’ on YouTube.

🎨 Photopea is a neat online image editor, but there’s now Vectorpea, a browser-based vector editor, a la Illustrator.

🤗 If you want to take initial steps into contributing to open source JavaScript projects on GitHub, verto.sh has curated a collection of projects to check out.

RELEASES:

p5.js 1.8 – Processing-inspired creative coding environment. v1.8 has some WebGL related improvements.

Node v20.9.0 (LTS) – Node v20 finally becomes the newest ‘active LTS’ release and has the codename ‘Iron.’

Billboard.js 3.10 – Rich charting library.

Bun 1.0.7

📒 Articles & Tutorials

Svelte by Example: A Gentle Introduction — A succinct, gentle, and code-focused introduction to Svelte and SvelteKit.

Sebastian De Deyne

‘Why I Won’t Use Next.js’ — From the perspective of web standards to concerns about increasing complexity, Kent C. Dodds shares his opinions on why he won’t use Next.js. It’s spicy and opinionated, but always thoughtful. (In other Kent news, he’s just launched Epic Web, his new full-stack webapp development course.)

Kent C. Dodds

Product for Engineers: A Newsletter Helping Flex Your Product Muscle — Subscribe to get curated advice on building great products, lessons from PostHog, and best practices of top startups.

PostHog sponsor

Goodbye, Node.js Buffer — Given Sindre’s gigantic number of libraries, he could possibly migrate half the ecosystem solo.. 😏 but he sets out a case for discouraging the use of Buffer in favor of the cross-platform Uint8Array, and explains how to make the move.

Sindre Sorhus

Changing Colors in an SVG Element with CSS and JavaScript — Almost everything inside an inline SVG image is up for modification using CSS and JS.

Kirupa Chinnathambi

ES Module Imports in Node.js and the Browser — Just a quick example/handy recap of the basic setup.

Eli Bendersky

Playing with the Gamepad API — One developer’s attempt to get JavaScript games ready to use controllers in the browser.

Alvaro Montoro

Using Cloudflare’s AI Workers to Add Translations to PDFs

Raymond Camden

▶  My Problem with Using TypeScript in 2023

James Q Quick

▶  Vue 3 for Beginners — A mega three hour workshop on YouTube.

Allan Jeremy

🛠 Code & Tools

Radix Vue 1.0: Unstyled, Accessible Components for Vue.js — An unofficial Vue port of the popular Radix UI component library. GitHub repo.

zernonia et al.

React Magic Motion: Automagical Animation for Components — Built on top of Framer Motion so you get all of its features, but with opinionated, default transitions for child components.

Etesam Ansari

No-Code Machine Learning on the Simplest Development Platform ‑ Catalyst

QuickML – Catalyst by Zoho sponsor

background-removal: Remove Image Backgrounds in JS — Wipe away backgrounds in both Node and the browser (so there’s a live demo) without relying on third party services. It does use a large pre-trained model to do this, however, and is GPL licensed, so your mileage may vary.

img․ly

Wireit: Makes npm/Yarn Scripts Smarter, More Efficient — Working with npm run and not replacing it, Wireit extends your scripts with features like result caching, parallelization, and re-running on changes.

Google

📈 Perspective 2.6 – Data visualization and analytics component, suited for streaming or large dataset use cases, with a mildly hypnotic, rapidly updating homepage (above) – GitHub repo.

📋 Clipboardy 4.0 – Access the system clipboard from Node and browsers.

npm-publish 3.0 – GitHub Action to publish packages to npm.

http-fake-backend 5.0 – Build a fake backend by providing JSON.

Opal 1.8 – Ruby to JavaScript transpiler.

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

MDX 3.0 – Use JSX in Markdown documents.

Size Limit 10 – Performance budget tool for JavaScript.

Jotai 2.5 – Atomic global React state management.

Protobuf-ES 1.4 – Protocol Buffers for JS/TS.

NodeBB 3.5 – Node.js-powered forum system.

QUOTABLE:

“There are two methods in software design. One is to make the program so simple, there are obviously no errors. The other is to make it so complicated, there are no obvious errors.”

___
Tony Hoare, inventor of the quicksort algorithm.

Taking JavaScript into Python

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#​650 — August 3, 2023

Read on the Web

JavaScript Weekly

A Tale of Evading JavaScript Anti-Debugging Techniques — When you’re poking arounddebugging code written and distributed by a third party, there might be some sneaky traps thrown in your path to prevent your usual techniques from working. What next? Disable breakpoints in DevTools? Use a proxy? What about.. recompiling your entire browser? 😆

Veritas

This reminds me of the guy who scraped pages by dumping heap snapshots from the browser – another fun post if you enjoy low level spelunking.

VanJS 1.0: A 1KB Reactive UI Framework Without React/JSX — 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. This week’s v1.0 release is a relatively big step forward for what is still a young project. GitHub repo.

Tao Xin

Add Excel-Like Spreadsheet Features to Your JavaScript Apps: SpreadJS — SpreadJS is the industry-leading JavaScript spreadsheet for adding advanced spreadsheet features to your enterprise apps. Build finance, analysis, budget, and other apps. Excel I/O, 500+ calc functions, tables, charts, and more. View demos now.

SpreadJS from GrapeCity sponsor

PythonMonkey: JavaScript/WASM Interop for Python — The alpha release of a new way to bring Python and JavaScript together, by way of embedding Mozilla SpiderMonkey into the Python VM. This post introduces the concept with some examples, an idea of where the project is headed, as well as some Colab demos. GitHub repo.

Will Pringle

dnt: A Tool to Publish a Hybrid npm Module for ESM and CommonJS — From the Deno team comes a tool that lets you write modules in JavaScript or TypeScript and then transforms them to support CommonJS, ESM, browsers, Deno, Node, and more.

Andy Jiang (Deno)

⚡️ IN BRIEF:

🎧 The popular Syntax.fm podcast has had a run of interesting episodes lately covering topics like the idea of ▶️ server-side JavaScript standards, ▶️ Rust for JavaScript developers, and ▶️ the role of polyfills.

A social engineering campaign that targets tech employees has been spreading through npm malware, claims Feross Aboukhadijeh of Socket.

Radix UI is now available in Vue thanks to Radix Vue.

Google has unveiled some big improvements to how the Google Maps JavaScript code can be loaded.

Firefox 116’s DevTools now support Custom Object formatters. This feature, long supported by Chrome, lets sites determine how certain types of object representation are formatted in the console and debugger.

The Svelte project has posted its latest monthly update. There’s a lot going on in the Svelte world right now.

Logging and Tracing Re-invented. Stop Sampling, Get Axiom —
“In the beginning there was stdout….” Get started for free, or get 1tb for $25/mo.

Axiom sponsor

🎉 RELEASES:

Backbone 1.5 – Yes. Really. And it’s still a thing of beauty.

Shoelace 2.6 – Popular suite of agnostic UI Web Components.

Prisma 5.1 – Next-gen Node.js + TypeScript ORM.

eslint-config-prettier 8.10 – Turn off ESLint rules that clash with Prettier.

📒 Articles & Tutorials

Understanding React Server Components — If you’ve struggled to get your head around the ideas involved, and Dan Abramov’s ‘let’s recreate RSCs from scratch’ went too deep, this is a good, high-level explanation of the fundamentals covering what problems RSCs solve, why you might use them, and how Next.js makes it all easier.

Alice Moore (Vercel)

Type vs Interface: Which Should You Use in 2023? — Learn the key differences between interfaces and type aliases in TypeScript, including their use cases and important features to consider.

Matt Pocock

How to Build a Multilanguage Website with Next.js & Storyblok

Storyblok sponsor

Speeding Up V8 Heap Snapshots — When diagnosing a memory leak in a JavaScript app, engineers at Bloomberg encountered some weird performance issues with capturing a single full-size heapshot taking more than 30 minutes(!) at times. Here’s the full story of how they investigated and resolved the problem.

José Dapena Paz (Igalia)

‘If Web Components Are So Great, Why Am I Not Using Them?’ — Do Web Components have a marketing problem? Dave thinks so, and shares what he thinks the issues are for this slowly-adopted technology.

Dave Rupert

▶  How to Build a Drag-and-Drop Kanban Board — A complete screencast walkthrough of using React to build a Trello-like app based around the familiar Kanban board pattern. It also serves as an introduction to the dnd-kit drag-and-drop toolkit.

Kliton Bare

An Introduction to Quicksort — A good, beginner friendly introduction to the Quicksort algorithm, concluding with a JavaScript implementation. (Beware the floating burger though..)

Kirupa Chinnathambi

Everything Mux Learnt Migrating 50K Lines of Code to React Server Components

Darius Cepulis (Mux)

▶  Refactoring an Angular App to Modern NgRx — NgRx is a reactive state management approach for Angular.

Marko Stanimirovic

🛠 Code & Tools

tsup 7.2: Bundle Your TypeScript Library with No Config — Throw your .js, .json, .mjs, .ts, and .tsx files at the esbuild-powered tsup and say hello to transpiled, bundled code for distribution. More in this tutorial.

egoist

Vite React Boilerplate: A Production Ready Starter Template — A new ‘batteries included’ Vite + React app template that leans upon, well, a lot of batteries from Zustand to Zod to Storybook.

Ricardo Valdovinos

Add Authorization, MFA, Biometrics and More to Your JavaScript App in Just Minutes — It’s about time that somebody talked some sense about OAuth and JavaScript. So we did. You’re welcome.

FusionAuth sponsor

Hackathon Starter 8.0: A Boilerplate for Node Web Apps — For when you might want to start building a Node app quickly (like at a hackathon, say) including key features like auth/OAuth, Bootstrap 5, account management, email forms..

Sahat Yalkabov

OGL 1.0: A Minimal WebGL Framework — WebGL is far from the easiest technology to use on its own, so libraries like Three.js are often used to make it more accessible. OGL has a similar motive to Three.js while remaining far closer to the WebGL metal.

Nathan Gordon et al.

💻 Jobs

Senior Software Engineer (Frontend Lead) — Come lead Emerge’s web platform, used by teams like DoorDash, Square, Dropbox & Airbnb (our stack: Next.js, React, TS, Vercel).

🛸 Emerge Tools

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.

Size Limit 8.2: JavaScript Performance Budgeting Tool — Calculate the real ‘cost’ to run your JS app or lib and maintain an eye on performance and raise the alarm (in your CI system, say) when things go awry. Supports ES modules and tree shaking.

Andrey Sitnik

Stockfish.js 16 – The famous Stockfish chess engine in JS via WASM.

Marked 6.0 – Fast Markdown parser and compiler. Now rewritten in TypeScript.

eta (η) 3.1 – Embedded JS template engine. Now with Bun support.

Tremor 3.6 – React library for building dashboards.

Octokit.js 3.1 – ‘Batteries-included’ GitHub SDK.

React Image Gallery 1.3 – Image gallery carousel component.

YouTube.js 5.8 – Library to use YouTube’s private API.

🐴 Let’s hit the Oregon Trail

The Oregon Trail was a 2000+ mile wagon route used by traders and migrants headed west in the early days of the United States. It was also a hugely popular computer game that, more often than not, ended in disaster for the virtual settlers whose lives you directed.

Particularly popular on the Apple II and early Macs, you can give the game a spin via the following project:

Macintosh.js: A Virtual Macintosh Running via Electron — An impressive virtual machine emulating a 1991 Macintosh Quadra 900 with System 8, all running in Electron. We linked to this several years ago but it’s had some updates since then and runs faster than before. As well as a few games, such as Oregon Trail, there are a variety of apps pre-installed, including a trial of Adobe Photoshop 3 which starts up faster than my real Photoshop now.. (Download necessary since it’s an Electron app and all..)

Felix Rieseberg, Apple, et al.

11 years of JavaScript on top

Posted on by

#​643 — June 15, 2023

Read on the Web

✍️ Be sure to make it to the end of today’s issue because we have an interview with the creator of Angular and Qwik, Miško Hevery, about exactly what Qwik brings to the modern JavaScript development table. Spoiler: performance and resumability.
__
Your editor, Peter Cooper

JavaScript Weekly

Val Town: If GitHub Gists Could Run, and AWS Lambda Were Fun — I’ve been keeping an eye on this for a few months and it’s a fascinating idea rapidly turning into a useful service that’s going places. You write bite size chunks of JavaScript and Val Town runs them in a sandbox, lets them call each other, lets you schedule them, or serves them up over HTTP. It’s smart and worth a look.

Steve Krouse

The Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2023 Results — Over 90,000 developers took Stack Overflow’s annual survey and it’s all “coming up Milhouse” ▶️ for JavaScript (and TypeScript too, natch) with JS topping the popularity charts 11 years in a row. Its showing is somewhat poorer in the top paying technologies list, but we can’t have it all.

Stack Overflow

Enterprise UI Development: Testing & Code Quality — Managing or migrating large apps and codebases? This video course covers what you need to know to scale efficiently whilst maintaining code quality. Covers unit testing, CI pipelines, mocking, code coverage, and more.

Frontend Masters sponsor

Melange 1.0: Compile OCaml / ReasonML to JavaScript — Having started life as a fork of BuckleScript, Melange now pitches itself as a mature tool for compiling OCaml (a popular functional programming language) to efficient and readable JavaScript.

Antonio Nuno Monteiro, Hongbo Zhang et al.

⚡️ IN BRIEF:

Chrome for Testing is a new, official Chrome ‘flavor’ specifically targeting web testing and automation use cases. You can already use it with Puppeteer.

Angular’s ng-conf event is currently taking place, and the latest news is the release of Angular 16.1 (now with TypeScript 5.1 support), an RFC for a new control flow syntax, and an RFC for built-in declarative lazy loading.

Allegedly, you can’t currently publish npm packages containing the words ‘keygen’ or ‘cheat’ in their names. Hacker News has been discussing it and a response from npm is currently being awaited.

Terence Eden has come up with a way to password protect a static HTML page with no JavaScript but it’s such an odd approach that you might not want to use it in production 😆

RELEASES:

Node.js v20.3.0 (Current)

VS Code May 2023 Edition – Adds a JS refactoring to move a class, function, or constant into an existing file and update all references.

Bun 0.6.9 – Mostly fixes and memory efficiencies for the alternative JS runtime. Nice.

TS-Pattern 5.0
↳ Exhaustive pattern matching library for TypeScript.

NestJS 10.0 – Progressive Node.js app framework. (What’s new.)

📒 Articles & Tutorials

An Introduction to Debugging Tools and Approaches for Node — An informative primer on debugging, from simple things like using IDE extensions to highlight potential problems or, yes, console logging, through to using the V8 inspector and debugging via Chrome.

Craig Buckler

Before Your Next Frontend Pull Request, Use This Checklist — Avoid common mistakes in pull requests with this checklist, covering areas from minimizing bundle size and ensuring accessibility to using semantic markup and keeping code clean.

Nina Torgunakova

Breakpoints and console.log Is the Past, Time Travel Is the Future — 15x faster JavaScript debugging than with breakpoints and console.log, supports Vitest, jest, karma, jasmine, and more.

Wallaby.js sponsor

▶  Nuxt Explained in 100 Seconds — One of Fireship’s typical fast-paced high level roundups. This time they cover Nuxt, the Vue-oriented app framework.

Fireship

How To Build Server-Side Rendered (SSR) Svelte Apps with SvelteKit — SvelteKit is a framework for building apps using Svelte. This post walks through creating a simple job board with it and deploying on Netlify.

Sriram Thiagarajan

▶  Learn Angular Routing in 35 Minutes

Ervis Trupja

🛠 Code & Tools

Motion Canvas: A TypeScript Library and Real-Time Preview Editor to Program Animations — Uses generator functions to procedurally define your animations, and you can try out the web-based editor that allows you to work with the animations visually.

Motion Canvas

Code Together Before You Work Together. Interview Devs in a Real IDE — Skip algorithm interviews & use CoderPad to run coding interviews that are trusted by both candidates and interviewers.

CoderPad sponsor

Threlte: A Three.js Scene Renderer and Component Library for Svelte — react-three-fiber is great, but if you prefer Svelte, this is the alternative for you. It appears to be under very active development too with a whole new version on the way soon. GitHub repo.

Grischa Erbe

Million.js: A Performance-Focused VDOM Replacement for React — Starting life two years ago as a small, library-agnostic virtual DOM implementation, Million has recently presented itself as a performance enhancement for React: “Imagine React components running at the speed of raw JavaScript.”

Aiden Bai

📰 We featured this in this week’s React Status newsletter – if you’re a React developer, we focus more heavily on React news there.

jest-extended 4.0: Additional Matchers for Jest Users — If you’re using Jest for testing, this project introduces a variety of more specific matchers for various situations, particularly around type, value and format checking.

Jest Community

Rewind-UI: Customizable React + Tailwind CSS Component Library — A React component library fitting into the Tailwind CSS way of thinking. You can play with a live demo of some basic customizations on the homepage. It’s in beta but there are about thirty components to sink your teeth into.

Nick Dunas

React Authentication — Without Complexity

Userfront sponsor

⏱🌎  tz-lookup 8.0: Fast Time Zone Estimations from Latitude and Longitude — “This package trades speed and size for accuracy.” If you need to quickly infer timezone from location in Node or the browser, it’s worth a try.

Matthew McEachen

SVG.js v3.2: SVG Manipulation and Animation Library — A lightweight approach without dependencies. There’s a demo on JSFiddle you can play with. GitHub repo.

Various Authors

Vue-ECharts 6.6
↳ Apache ECharts component for Vue.js. (Demo.)

Neutralino.js 4.12.0 – JS desktop app framework.

Mineflayer 4.9 – Create Minecraft bots in JavaScript.

Tremor 3.1 – React dashboard building library.

♖ React Chessboard 3.0 – Yes, a chess component!

React Calendar 4.3

Dehydrating the Web with…
Miško Hevery

Perhaps best known as the creator of Angular, Miško is on a fresh mission with Qwik. Recently reaching v1.0 and focusing on the ‘instant’ delivery of full-stack apps to end users, Qwik takes an interesting approach around ‘streaming’ JavaScript to the client only when needed.

Miško recently shared the full story of Qwik ▶️ on the Stack Overflow podcast, and we wanted to ask him a few questions here too:

What was the key inspiration behind Qwik?

I don’t think there was a “key” inspiration but an accumulation of things that made me realize the current approach doesn’t scale.

We did a lot of work making the Ivy compiler in Angular faster and more capable. While we had a lot of success, the speed wins were not obvious. While Ivy was optimized, the rest of the app was not, and at app startup the code ran without optimization because the VM hadn’t warmed up.

Google has an internal framework called WIZ that powers Google Search, Flights, and Photos. WIZ is great at not executing a lot of code on app startup, and it results in a better user experience.

The realization that code runs more slowly on app startup and that it’s proportional to the amount of JS to execute, is what led me to building a framework that would not need to execute code eagerly on startup. Qwik is the culmination of that goal.

What is Qwik’s biggest differentiator to other frameworks?

Qwik is resumable. Qwik can transfer its internal state from the server to the client, which means that the app can become interactive on the client without having to execute any app-related code eagerly.

Resumablity is at the heart of Qwik. Qwik apps can resume because Qwik knows how to serialize the state of the app and the framework. Other frameworks know how to serialize the app state but not necessarily the framework state.

(Editor’s note: Think Qwik goes into more detail on this.)

Some developers have strong opinions about the use of symbols like $ in names. Did you have any qualms and did you consider any alternatives?

Some people have visceral reactions to $ as it reminds them of jQuery or PHP.

Qwik needs a way to mark closures for extraction. JavaScript doesn’t have an easy syntax for doing this so we needed to come up with our own. $ communicates to the optimizer that it needs to perform code extraction at that location, and also communicates to the developer that special rules apply there too.

We chose $ as it’s one of the few non-alpha characters valid in function names and that does not change the pronunciation of the API.

Misko is CTO at Builder.io and creator of Qwik.

💻 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.

Microsoft shrunk the TypeScript

Posted on by

#​640 — May 25, 2023

Read on the Web

JavaScript Weekly

DeviceScript: TypeScript for Tiny Thingamabobs — DeviceScript is a new Microsoft effort to take the TypeScript experience to low-resource microcontroller-based devices. It’s compiled to a custom VM bytecode which can run in such constrained environments. (A bit like Go’s TinyGo.) It’s aimed at VS Code users but there’s a CLI option too.

Microsoft

The State of Node.js Performance in 2023 — Node 20 gets put through its paces against 18.16 and 16.20 with a few different benchmark suites running on an EC2 instance. It goes into a lot of depth that’s worth checking out, but if you haven’t got time, the conclusion is “Node 20 is faster.” Good.

Rafael Gonzaga

Lightning Fast JavaScript Data Grid Widget — Try a professional JS data grid component which lets you edit, sort, group and filter datasets with fantastic UX & performance. Includes a TreeGrid, API docs and lots of demos. Seamlessly integrates with React, Angular & Vue apps.

Bryntum Grid sponsor

Deno 1.34: Now deno compile Supports npm Packages — Deno isn’t Node, but it increasingly likes to wear a Node-shaped costume. This release focuses on npm and Node compatibility and Deno’s compile command (for turning projects into single binary executables) now supports npm packages too which opens up a lot of use cases.

The Deno Team

⚡️ IN BRIEF:

TC39’s Hemanth.HM shares some updates from TC39’s 96th meeting. Atomics.waitAsync, the /v flag for regexes, and a method to detect well formatted Unicode strings all move up to stage 4.

The Angular team shares the results of their annual developer survey. Over 12,000 Angular developers responded.

RELEASES:

Astro 2.5

Preact 10.15 – Fast 3KB React alternative.

TypeScript 5.1 RC

Electron 24.4

MapLibre GL JS v3 – WebGL-powered vector tile maps.

???? Articles & Tutorials

Demystifying Tupper’s Formula — Tupper’s self-referential formula is a formula that, when plotted, can represent itself. Confused? Luckily Eli shows us how simple the concept is and how to use JavaScript to render your own.

Eli Bendersky

An Introduction to Web Components — A practical and straightforward introduction to using the custom element API now supported in all major browsers to create a basic tabbed panel.

Mohamed Rasvi

▶  Creative Coding with p5.js in Visual Studio Code — p5.js is a ‘creative coding’ library that takes a lot of inspiration from Processing. Dan does a great job at showing it off and sharing his enthusiasm for it. The main content starts at about 8-minutes in.

Daniel Shiffman and Olivia Guzzardo

Auth. Built for Devs, by Devs — Easily add login, registration, SSO, MFA, user controls and more auth features to your app in any framework.

FusionAuth sponsor

▶  Why React is Here to Stay — A rebuttal of sorts to Adam Elmore’s video from two weeks ago: ▶️ I’m Done with React.

Joscha Neske

Comparing Three Ways of Processing Arrays Non-Destructively — for-of, .reduce(), and .flatMap() go up against each other.

Dr. Axel Rauschmayer

Build Your First JavaScript ChatGPT Plugin — Plugins provide a way to extend ChatGPT’s functionality.

Mark O’Neill

How I’ve Shifted My Angular App to a Standalone Components Approach

Kamil Konopka

???? Code & Tools

Javy 1.0: A JS to WebAssembly Toolchain — Originally built at Shopify, Java takes your JS code and runs it in a WASM-embedded runtime. It’s worth scanning the example to get a feel for the process. “We’re confident that the Javy CLI is in good enough shape for general use so we’re releasing it as v1.0.0.”

Bytecode Alliance

Inkline 4.0: A Customizable Vue.js 3 UI/UX Library — A design system and numerous customizable components designed for mobile-first (but desktop friendly) and built with accessibility in mind.

Alex Grozav

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

BlockNote: A ‘Notion-Like’ Block-Based Text Editor — Flexible and presents an extensive API so you can integrate it with whatever you want to do. You can drag and drop blocks, add real-time collaboration, add customizable ‘slash command’ menus, and more. Builds on top of ProseMirror and TipTap.

TypeCell

Windstatic: A Set of 170+ Components and Layouts Made with Tailwind and Alpine.js — Categorized under page sections, nav, and forms, and each category includes multiple components you can drop into projects.

Michael Andreuzza

ls-lint 2.0: A Fast File and Directory Name Linter — Written in Go but aimed at JS/front-end dev use cases, ls-lint provides a way to enforce rules for file naming and directory structures.

Lucas Löffel

Jest Puppeteer 9.0: Run Tests using Jest and Puppeteer — A Jest preset enabling end-to-end testing with Puppeteer.

Argos CI

ts-sql-query: Type-Safe SQL Query Builder — Want to build dynamic SQL queries in a type-safe way with TypeScript verifying queries? This is for you. Supports numerous SQL-based database systems and isn’t an ORM itself.

Juan Luis Paz Rojas

React Authentication, Simplified

Userfront sponsor

Hashids.js 2.3
↳ Generate YouTube-like IDs.

Tabulator 5.5
↳ Interactive table and data grid control.

gridstack.js 8.2
↳ Dashboard layout and creation library.

Cypress GitHub Action 5.8
↳ Action for running Cypress end-to-end tests.

ReacType 16.0
↳ Visual prototyping tool that exports React code.

Mongoose 7.2 – MongoDB modelling library.

Eta (η) 2.2 – Embedded JS template engine.

AVA 5.3 – Popular Node test runner.

MelonJS 15.3 – HTML5 game engine.

???? 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.

???? Node.js developer? Check out the latest issue of Node Weekly, our sibling newsletter about all things Node.js — from tutorials and screencasts to news and releases. While we include some Node related items here in JavaScript Weekly, we save most of it for there.

→ Check out Node Weekly here.

The return of ECMAScript 2023 (and Angular)

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#​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.

JavaScript on your schedule

Posted on by

#​633 — April 6, 2023

Read on the Web

❓ JavaScript Weekly on a Thursday? It’s true. As well as it being Good Friday tomorrow, we’ve decided to move to Thursday permanently going forward. We hope you have a good Easter, if you celebrate it, otherwise enjoy one fewer email on Fridays ????
__
Your editor, Peter Cooper

JavaScript Weekly

Croner: Cron for JavaScript and TypeScript — Trigger functions upon the schedule of your choice using the classic cron syntax. Works in Node, Deno, Bun and the browser, across time zones, offers error handling and overrun protection, and more. There’s an interesting live demo on JSFiddle.

Hexagon

▶️ JSON vs XML with Douglas Crockford — The author of 2008’s hugely popular JavaScript: The Good Parts went on a podcast to share the story of JSON, his discovery of JavaScript’s ‘good parts’, and his general approach to building software, including his dislike of JavaScript ‘frameworks.’ There’s a transcript if you’re not keen on listening. (50 minutes.)

CoRecursive Podcast podcast

Headless CMS with World-Class TypeScript Support — Kontent.ai is the leading platform for modular content. Streamline your code using TypeScript SDK, CLI, Rich text resolver, and strongly typed model generator. Scale with no problems when your project grows. Have you seen our UI?

Kontent.ai sponsor

The Angular Signals RFC — There’s a lot of excitement about a shift in Angular involving the addition of signals as a reactive primitive – the official RFC is now available for this feature, and you’re encouraged to leave comments. If you’d rather see a practical use for signals, Joshua Morony recorded ▶️ a screencast showing them off.

Angular Team

Over 100 Algorithms and Data Structures Demonstrated in JS — Examples of many common algorithms (e.g. bit manipulation, Pascal’s triangle, Hamming distance) and data structures (e.g. linked lists, tries, graphs) with explanations.

Oleksii Trekhleb et al.

IN BRIEF:

Laurie Voss looks at the most popular frameworks used in sites deployed to Netlify. React-based options lead the way.

Oliver Dunk of the Chrome Extensions Team has posted an update on the Manifest V2 to Manifest V3 transition – it’s taking longer than expected so Manifest V2 isn’t disappearing any time soon.

V8 v11.2 is shipping with support for WebAssembly tail calls.

With Chrome 113, Chrome is now shipping support for WebGPU.

A look at how Microsoft’s Blazor (a stack aimed at building front-end apps with C#) is skirting around JavaScript with its focus on WebAssembly.

JSDayIE 2023: The First JavaScript Conference in Ireland Is Back! — Join us on September 26th in Dublin to experience everything the Irish JavaScript community and Ireland have to offer.

JSDayIE sponsor

RELEASES:

Electron 24.0 – Complete with Chromium 112, V8 11.2, and Node 18.14.

Storybook 7.0 – Though still tagged ‘next’ and pending a proper launch.

Storybook for React Native 6.5

WebStorm 2023.1 – Commercial JS IDE from JetBrains.

Rete.js 2.0 Beta – Framework for building node-based editors.

???? Articles & Tutorials

Making a Big, Slow Vue/Alpine Page ‘Blazingly’ Fast — A practical example of a pattern the author is billing a “reactive switchboard.” “I’m going to use Vue/Alpine lingo in this article, but I think this pattern applies to lots of different tools.”

Caleb Porzio

▶  Watch Dan Abramov Explore React Server Components — At an epic (though well timestamped) four hours, this isn’t a quick watch, but Dan and Ben Holmes walk through everything React Server Components oriented, complete with diagrams, code, and a real-world app.

Ben Holmes

Getting PWAs in App Stores with PWABuilder — Thomas Steiner demonstrates how PWABuilder makes it possible to submit Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) to app stores like those provided by Google, Apple, and Microsoft.

Thomas Steiner (Google)

Add a Full-Featured Notification Center to Your App in Minutes

Courier.com sponsor

What Are Source Maps? — Learn how source maps can help you debug your original code instead of what was actually deployed after the build process.

Sofia Emelianova (Chrome Developers)

How I Used ChatGPT in My JavaScript Projects

James Q Quick

???? Code & Tools

Relaunching JSPM CLI for Import Map Package Management — Several years ago when JS had numerous competing module formats, JSPM was a useful package manager atop SystemJS, but now it’s being relaunched as an import map package management tool.

Guy Bedford

Chrome Extension CLI 1.4: CLI for Building Chrome Extensions — Want to get building an extension for Chrome as quickly as possible? This Node-powered tool aims to get you on the right path ASAP. v1.4 adds a script to generate a ZIP file (also known as a ‘postcode file’ at Microsoft UK? ????) of the extension.

Dutiyesh Salunkhe

React Chrono 2: A Flexible Timeline Component — A complete overhaul of a popular component. You can render themeable timelines in vertical, horizontal, or vertical alternating orientations. It includes keyboard navigation support, auto advancement, and, as of v2, support for nested timelines.

Prabhu Murthy

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

Jampack: A Post-Processing Tool to Optimize Static Websites — Similar to a bundler or build tool, with features like image optimization, asset compression, and some code auto-fixes — all amounting to strong Core Web Vitals scores.

divRIOTS

imask.js 6.5.0: A Vanilla JavaScript Input Mask — Prevent users from entering invalid values. Has plugins for Vue, Angular, React, Svelte, and Solid, if needed.

imaskjs

tween.js 19.0
↳ JS tweening engine for easy animations.

Swiper 9.2
↳ Modern mobile-friendly touch slider.

gridstack.js 7.3
↳ Dashboard layout and creation framework.

ReacType 15.0
↳ Visual prototyping tool that can export React apps.

xstyled 3.8
↳ Utility-first CSS-in-JS framework for React.

Spacetime 7.4.2
↳ Lightweight timezone 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.

???? Wise Words of the Week

A reminder from Vue.js’s Evan You that we live in a vast and varied world, including in the JavaScript ecosystem:

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

Nodesource Node.js Binary Distributions 2021 & 2022

Posted on by Simon Helberg

NodeSource Node.js binary downloads keep increasing monthly, providing millions of users worldwide with the power of Node.js. This blog post gives us important insights into using Node.js across Linux environments and the Node.js community in general.

Nodesource has been packaging and distributing Node.js for Linux environments for 9 years. Every major and minor release, as well as security updates. We’ve seen a massive increase in downloads every year. While we don’t distribute every version of Node.js, most of the downloads in Linux environments are provided by us.

Have you ever wondered how many people still use Node.js version?
Which countries consume Node.js the most?
What versions and distributions are the most popular?
What are the downloads of Node.js month by month?
Are they increasing, or are people moving away toward other technologies?

Let’s find out!

Get the awesome infographic here!
Node.js Binary Downloads

Note: If you want to compare, you can read Node by Numbers 2020 here.

In this article, you can find interesting data about the consumption of Node.js worldwide. the trends, spikes, and odds of the usage of the popular runtime that powers millions of applications.

These are the points to be discussed in this article:

Intro
A bit of History
Process: How is a new release created?
How does the distribution process work?
Stats!
Recent distributions supported
Traffic Peaks
Getting Involved
Conclusions

Introduction

First, let’s start with the basics:

_What is a binary distribution?
_

A binary distribution is a software package containing executables, binaries, or programs ready to be executed. In this case, it will be Node and NPM compiled executables.

_In what consists of the ‘Nodesource Node.js Binary Distributions’
_

Maintains availability and allows the usage of Node.js in production for the Linux community.
If you are installing Node.js in production on a Linux platform, there is a big chance that you are using NodeSource Node.js Binary Distributions.

why is this important?

Well, NodeSource Node.js binary distributions was downloaded over 90 million times worldwide last year. There are 90 million times people have been able to use, learn, and interact with Node.js thanks to this project.

Last month, it was downloaded +11 million times, and millions of applications and web pages are using it. Because of its availability, it has proven over the years to be the best source of installation and extensive use of Node.js packages in Linux, allowing the expansion of its use in the market.

_What kind of distributions are supported?
_

So right, as you can see, we support major Debian, Ubuntu, Redhat, CentOS, and Fedora releases and many different distributions based on those. As you can see, the list can’t go long, but we are always trying to add more there.

Also, if you are using code as infrastructure, the major recipes, formulas, or plugins that include Node.js installation usually work using Binaries distributions.

So if you’re using:

__Ansible__: https://galaxy.ansible.com/

__Chef__: https://supermarket.chef.io/

__Puppet__: https://forge.puppet.com/modules/puppet

__Salt__: https://github.com/saltstack-formulas/node-formula

You are already using binary distributions, and it is recommended to use the Node.js installer. That’s what the NPM documentation and the NodeJS official documentation say. So it’s proven to be the best source of installing these sectors.

A bit of History of Node.js Binary Distributions

_How NodeSource get involved in this project?
_

So, here are some essential milestones for the project:

It started with Chris Leajoining NodeSource in 2014.

Initially supporting Debian and Ubuntu with Node.js V12.

Added support for RHEL, Centos, Fedora, Oracle Linux, and Amazon Linux.

A script was created to ease the setup process. Later we created a script to make the installation process more manageable because you have to add the PPA manually. Now everything is automated!

Io.js was born and immediately supported.

In 2018 we started delivering Node.js in snap packages. A compatible format with multiple Linux distributions that you can use.

Since then, we have expanded support for many compatible Linux Distributions.

We support OpenJS Foundation and the Node.js project doing the same with every LTS and stable release the Node.js project has released.

Now let’s talk about how a new release is created.

Process – How is a new release in Node.js created

There are two processes involved when releasing a new version of Node.

The first comes from the node project itself.
The second is from the nodes or Node.js binaries distributions for the Linux operating system.

So it’s helpful to understand how the release lines work. All the releases are scheduled and planned. There are three stages on a Node version: Current, LTS, and the end of life.

Current NodeJS release line in the graph is colored green, as we can see here. And this space lasts for six months, from April to October.

LTS is an acronym for long-term support and is applied to release lines that will be supported and maintained by the Node.js project for an extensive period. LTS divides into two active and maintenance; Active is the blue, as we can see here. Maintenance is gray. Active is the one that lasts for 18 months. Maintenance is a release line that is the end of life. That means it will no longer be maintained and will not be patched with any known security vulnerability. When the version reaches the end of its life, it is very affectable to upgrade. The whole process lasts for three years.

Also, there are three types of releases:

Major release that is for incompatible API changes from version to version. A major release can also include changes that would normally be included in minor or patch releases.

Minor releases there include backward-compatible functionality changes.

Patch releases include nonbreaking bug fixes and security patches.

So every new LTS is a major release. This is the process for delivering a new version of Node.js.

How the release happens inside NodeSource

We already understand how a version is created. So, every time a new version is released, everything starts from Nodesource Slack. We already have an integration that notifies in a unique channel that a new version is available, so we have to get to work and update to a recent version. We also have some automation that makes our life easier: We have a bot, or infrastructure bot, called __Control Tower__. It’s something we use internally for all everything in our infrastructure.

Control Tower allows us to run a single command to generate a new version that will communicate with different pipelines we have in AWS called pipelines. And that will use AWS code build to build the package and all the packaging, generating all the different binaries we need to distribute Debian, rpm, and other formats.

After building those, it will push to Amazon’s S3 bucket, and from there, we will have an origin server that will serve all these packages for everybody in the world. That’s how it works.

It’s a semi-automated process with a lot of automation involved! Now, let’s see some fascinating statistics involved in this project.

Node by Numbers 2021 & 2022

NodeSource NodeJS binary execution was downloaded over 98,420,550 million times worldwide last year (2021), and the total download from this year from January to October is 80,442,890 million (2022).

This graph is a monthly download in terabytes 1TB. This year it was 2,135 TB of binaries distributions from January to October.

There is a noticeable increase in the tendency of downloads, and this year the downloads are even more remarkable. In just one year, the increase was about 4,7% in downloads.

2021 – 2,088.73 TB

2022 – 2,135.98 TB

Again, this is a lot of data, and we expect these numbers to keep increasing as the Node project expands.

Now we are going to analyze the numbers by version. This is very important. Let’s take a look.

As you can see, people are still getting old versions like V6, which was deprecated. Then we have V8 and V10 with a few people; others are using V12 and V14, and some are using V15 and V16. Now let’s go to analyze the current status.

So this is 2022, and as you can see, many people still use V12. But the good news is that most people are using V14 and v16. We can expect V18 to start growing, as it became LTS at the end of October, and it’s the latest LTS we support.

If you want to try these things on production, it’s really good to use stable versions; we always recommend using in production the latest LTS. Please read this article to understand why it is important and useful to try Node.js V18 LTS.

Now let’s see where those downloads are happening worldwide and where people consume Node.js most.

The top five countries consuming Node.js binary distributions between 2021 and 2022 were the US, Germany, France, the UK, Ireland, and the Netherlands.

In 2022 the top five countries were:
– United States 60.9%
– Germany 9.3%
– France 3.6%
– United Kingdom & Ireland 3.3%
– Netherlands 2.0%

Many South American countries consume binaries, including Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, and Colombia. The only African country on the list is South Africa. Let’s hope more countries keep using the amazing Node.js project! 💪

Traffic Peaks

As we can see in this image, at the end of October of this year, 2022, there was a release, reaching Oct 25 with Node 18 12,185 downloads, and every time there’s a new release in Node.js, there is a peak in downloads of binaries distributions.

October 18th – Node V19

October 25th – Node V18 LTS

For Node V19 we started having downloads on October 19 with 1,594 downloads that day.

__Note__: If you want to be aware of the important dates of the project, here you can consult the: Node.js Project Calendar

Recent distributions supported by NodeSource

Two types of deprecations could happen in our channels:

__When a Node version reaches the End Of Life__, which means you will not receive any security updates or book patches in the future. We always recommend that you stay in the currently supported version. One important thing to note is that we do not remove the old packages. Even if you use a pre-owned node version, you can still use NodeSource binaries distribution.

__When Linux Distribution goes End Of Life__, be aware that this is not a good practice because your Linux distribution, your operating system, is no longer receiving any security updates or support. So we always recommend keeping a proper maintenance version of your operating system (We do not remove the old packages).

Note: Check the ‘End-of-Life Releases’ HERE.

Please update your Node.js, or you will see this thing when you’re installing the Node.js version that you are trying to install. We always present this Deprecation warning, and we make you wait 20 seconds so you can read the message and realize that maybe you should be updating your Node.js version.

Today, many people are using no longer supported versions. About 46% of downloads of Node.js versions were no longer supported. We want to launch a campaign encouraging developers to upgrade their node version. #UpgradeYourNodeVersion

Behind the Data

There is still a surprising amount of downloads of outdated versions in 2021 (39%) and in 2022 (46%) – People should upgrade!

The downloads are focused mostly in the Americas and Europe (86,9%) in 2021 and were the same in 2022, and some regions are severely underrepresented, for example, Africa. The Middle East in 2022 is increasing the downloads.

The most downloaded versions in 2022 were version 14 for rpm and for deb (32% of Downloads). Followed by V12 with 26% of the downloads. Node V16 was downloaded 20%.

deb distributions are more consumed than rpm, as is expected.

In 2022, an exciting milestone was an increase of 13,6% in downloads of NodeSource Node.js Binaries Distributions. We expect continued growth in 2023.

Getting Involved

So, how can you get involved in this project? There are many ways to contribute.

First, you can go to this link: https://github.com/nodesource/distributions

In that link is the repository where the project is hosted, and you can submit an issue, comment, or pull request. And it’s related chiefly to supporting new distributions to upgrade a distribution or to create an update script to download a particular distribution.

Another way is to keep updated documentation. If a new version over distribution changes, it should also be updated on the docs. When you submit an issue or a pull request, suggestions could be made to keep it compatible with the rest of the distribution, and submissions are always working.

If you collaborate with this project for a few months, you can ask and be included in this repo as a collaborator 💪.

Conclusions

Using NodeSource Node.js distributions is the best and most recommended way to install Node.js in Linux for production environments.

NodeSource has delivered Node.js fresh to your Linux system via your package manager within hours, minutes, days, or weeks. For NodeSource, sustaining the community is essential because we want to support more people using Linux to have Node.js in production.

Also, we are looking for more community involvement in the project. So most of our scripts are open source, and as you can see, there’s a lot of activity in the report that we just mentioned in this article. Help will be appreciated! So if you have ideas or solutions or want to help us continue supporting open source, you can contribute to this GitHub Repo.

Please join us and be part of this magnificent project. Also, 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]

_Ready for more? _

If you are looking for NodeSource’s Enterprise-grade Node.js platform, N|Solid, please visit https://downloads.nodesource.com/, and for detailed information on installing and using N|Solid, please refer to the N|Solid User Guide.

We We also know that as a start-up, you want ‘Enterprise-grade’ at a startup price, this is why we extend our product to small and medium-sized companies, startups, and non-profit organizations with N|Solid SaaS.

Please help us to reach more people and support use cases in Node.js. We care about the Node.js community! 💚You’re welcome to explore, read, and participate in this project.

Useful Links / References

Octoverse 2022
2022 Developer Survey Stack Overflow