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

A new jQuery release for Xmas

#​619 — December 16, 2022

Read on the Web

🎄 This is the final issue of the year – we’ll be back on January 6, 2023. We hope you have a fantastic holiday season, whether or not you are celebrating, and we’ll see you for a look back at 2022 in the first week of January 🙂
__
Peter Cooper and the Cooperpress team

JavaScript Weekly

Announcing SvelteKit 1.0Svelte is a virtual DOM-free, compiled ahead of time, frontend UI framework with many fans. SvelteKit introduces a framework and tooling around Svelte to build complete webapps. This release post explains some of its approach and how it differs to other systems.

The Svelte Team

Dr. Axel Tackles Two Proposals: Iterator Helpers and Set Methods — Here’s something to get your teeth into! Dr. Axel takes on two promising ECMAScript proposals and breaks down what they’re about and why they’ll (hopefully) become useful to JavaScript developers. The first tackles iterator helpers (new utility methods for working with iterable data) and the second tackles Set methods which will extend ES6’s Set object.

Dr. Axel Rauschmayer

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

🧈 ButterCMS sponsor

🏆  The Best of Node Weekly in 2022 — In this week’s issue of Node Weekly (our Node.js-focused sister newsletter) we looked back at the most popular items of the year, including the Tao of Node, an array of JavaScript testing best practices, and the most popular Node.js frameworks in 2022.

Node Weekly Newsletter

jQuery 3.6.2 Released — Humor me. You might not be using jQuery anymore, but it’s (still) the most widely deployed JavaScript library and it’s fantastic to see it being maintained.

jQuery Foundation

IN BRIEF:

Node 19.3.0 (Current) has been released to bring npm up to v9.2. Breaking changes in v9.x warrant this update and the release post explains the current policy around npm’s ongoing inclusion in Node.

ƛ The Glasgow Haskell Compiler (GHC) has gained a new JavaScript backend meaning the reference Haskell compiler can now emit JavaScript and be used more easily to build front-end apps.

GitHub is rolling out secrets scanning to all public repos for free.

The New Stack reflects on 2022 as a ‘golden year’ for JavaScript and some of the developments we’ve seen. We’ll be doing our own such roundup in the next issue.

RELEASES:

Node.js 16.19.0 (LTS) and 14.21.2 (LTS)

Chart.js 4
↳ Canvas-based chart library. (Samples.)

PouchDB 8.0
↳ CouchDB-inspired syncing database.

SWR 2.0 – React data-fetching library.

📒 Articles & Tutorials

Why Cypress v12 is a Big Deal — A practical example-led love letter of sorts to how the latest version of the popular Cypress ‘test anything that runs in a browser’ library makes testing frontend apps smoother than before.

Gleb Bahmutov

Five Challenges to Building an Isomorphic JS Library — When it comes to JavaScript, “isomorphic” means code or libraries that run both on client and server runtimes with minimal adaptations.

Nick Fahrenkrog (Doordash)

▶  A Podcast for Candid Chats on Product, Business & Leadership — Join Postlight leaders & guests as they discuss topics like running great meetings & creating solid product launches.

The Postlight Podcast sponsor

Next, Nest, Nuxt… Nust?“This blog post is for everyone looking for their new favorite JavaScript backend framework.” If the names of frameworks are all starting to blur together in your head, this is for you. Marius explains just what systems like Next and Gatsby do and touches on a few differences.

Marius Obert (Twilio)

Calculating the Maximum Diagonal Distance in a Given Collection of GeoJSON Features using Turf.js — This is cool. Turf.js is a geospatial analysis library, by the way.

Piotr Jaworski

Optimize Interaction to Next Paint — How to optimize for the experimental Interaction to Next Paint (INP) metric — a way to assess a page’s overall responsiveness to user interactions.

Jeremy Wagner & Philip Walton (Google)

Need to Upgrade to React 18.2? Don’t Have Time? Our Experts Can Help — Stuck in dependency hell? We’ve been there. Hire our team of experts to upgrade deps, gradually paying off tech debt.

UpgradeJS.com – JavaScript Upgrade Services by OmbuLabs sponsor

How We Configured pnpm and Turborepo for Our Monorepo

Pierre-Louis Mercereau (NHost)

Rendering Emails with Svelte

Gautier Ben Aim

🛠 Code & Tools

Wretch 2.3: A Wrapper Around fetch with an Intuitive Syntax — A long standing, mature library that makes fetch a little more extensible with a fluent API. Check the examples.

Julien Elbaz

SWR 2.0: Improved React Hooks for Data Fetching — The second major release of SWR (Stale-While-Revalidate) includes new mutation APIs, new developer tools, as well as improved support for concurrent rendering.

Ding, Liu, Kobayashi, and Xu

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

Shortcut (formerly Clubhouse.io) sponsor

vanilla-tilt.js 1.8: A Smooth 3D Tilting Effect Library — No dependencies and simple to use and customize. GitHub repo.

Șandor Sergiu

visx: Airbnb’s Low Level Visualization React Components — Bring your own state management, animation library, or CSS-in-JS.. visx can slot into any React setup. Demos.

Airbnb

Scene.js 1.7: A CSS Timeline-Based Animation Library — Plenty of examples on the site. Has components for React, Vue and Svelte.

Daybrush

PortalVue 3.0
↳ Feature-rich portal plugin for Vue 3.

Kea 3.1
↳ Composable state management for React.

jest-puppeteer 6.2
↳ Run tests using Jest + Puppeteer.

NodeBB 2.7 – Node.js based forum software.

Pino 8.8 – Fast JSON-oriented logger.

💻 Jobs

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

Stickermule

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

CKEditor

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

Hired

🎁 And one for fun

Snow.js: Add a Snow Effect to a Web Page — Well, it’s that time of the year (in some parts of the world!) If you’re more interested in how the effect is made, it’s inspired by this CodePen example built around some fancy CSS.

Or if you’re a bit more childish, you could always put Fart.js on your site.. 🙈

Merry Christmas to you all and we’ll see you again in 2023!