Microsoft shrunk the TypeScript

#​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 PackagesDeno 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 FormulaTupper’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 Codep5.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)

#​634 — April 13, 2023

Read on the Web

JavaScript Weekly

The JavaScript Equality Table GameMinesweeper 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

#​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

#​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 7.1Execa 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 ReactProseMirror 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?

#​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

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