Big news for both Next.js and Remix

#​661 — November 2, 2023

Read on the Web

JavaScript Weekly

Next.js 14 Released — Unveiled at last week’s Next.js Conf, v14 caused a lot of community discussion (not least on Hacker News), largely surrounding Server Actions being declared stable and the ‘backend-meets-frontend’ opportunities this opens up. A new partial prerendering feature is also in preview, allowing for dynamic responses but with the speed of an initial static response.

Lee Robinson and Tim Neutkens

💡 The New Stack has an overview of the release, and Focus Reactive has a (highly visual) recap of Next.js Conf itself – recommended if you didn’t watch the stream.

SDKs & OpenAPI Specs in Minutes Using Zod, tsoa, or Fastify — Using popular TS tooling to build your API? Our guides show you how to go from code to best in class OpenAPI specs & SDKs.

Speakeasy sponsor

Remix ❤️ Vite: Remix 2.2 Introduces Vite SupportRemix is a popular full-stack JavaScript framework that began as a paid product, but has been open source for two years now. If you found Remix’s compilation approach opaque before, we have great news: “With Vite, Remix is no longer a compiler. Remix itself is just a Vite plugin.” This post tells the full story.

Cattori and Dalgleish (Remix)

🗳 The folks behind the State of JavaScript survey have unveiled a new State of React survey to take. As with their other surveys, you get to test your knowledge as well as provide useful insights.

🔁 Shadow is a new, experimental browser engine built in JavaScript itself. It renders its output in your usual browser using an HTML canvas. Source code.

🔐 GitHub is scanning all public npm packages for leaked secrets. Note that if secrets are found, the provider associated with those secrets is notified.

❄️ WinterJS is a new JS Service Workers server, powered by Rust & SpiderMonkey.

🐥 Uh-oh, it’s Flappy Bird implemented in TypeScript types.

RELEASES:

Astro 3.4 – The Web framework gains page partials, a new experimental dev overlay, and more.

Visual Studio Code October 2023 – A couple of minor enhancements to the JS debugger, and Copilot Chat (if you have GitHub Copilot) can now provide better answers because it’s sent implementation details behind the symbols you mention.

jQuery 4.0 is 100% feature complete but it’s not released just yet.. but we know you can’t wait. Ditto for Angular 17 – more on that soon.

Rollup 4.2, Cypress 13.4, Ember.js 5.4, Stencil 4.7

📒 Articles & Tutorials

Speeding Up the JavaScript Ecosystem: Tailwind CSS — Marvin’s ongoing journey to improve our ecosystem by finding low-hanging performance-bearing fruit continues with a look at how the architecture of Tailwind CSS could be tuned.

Marvin Hagemeist

A New Way to Bring Garbage Collected Languages Efficiently to WebAssembly — WasmGC is a new and promising way to implement GC languages in WebAssembly and it’s now enabled by default in Chrome.

Alon Zakai (V8)

Generally Awesome UI Components For Project Management and Scheduling — Level up your UX with advanced data grids, calendars, schedulers, and Gantt charts.

Bryntum sponsor

▶  Your Website Does Not Need JavaScript — An hour long talk in which Amy builds a completely static website — using a collection of HTML and CSS files with no tracking, no scripting, no servers, and no third-party resources.

Amy Kapernick

Building a Generic RSS Parser Service with Cloudflare Workers — Ray walks through various iterations and improvements in trying to build an RSS parser that can work in the Workers environment.

Raymond Camden

Can Next.js Handle 5000 Pages? — Christian set out to push both Next.js and AWS Amplify hard. A good read.

Christian Nwamba

🗣 Is Express Still the ‘De-Facto’ Choice for Building Node.js Webapps?

Hacker News

🛠 Code & Tools

Svelte Flow: Node-Based UI for Svelte — From the creators of React Flow comes a Svelte version in the shape of a customizable Svelte component for building node-based editors and interactive diagrams. Check out the examples.

webkid GmbH

Docusaurus 3.0: Meta’s Static Site GeneratorDocusaurus is a popular React-powered tool aimed at building documentation sites, though it handles more general sites too. v3 features an upgrade to MDX v3, React 18, Mermaid v10, and essentially updates everything.

Sébastien Lorber

Get Logged Values Right Where You Need Them: In Your Editor — Simply start your editor, and your development server/test runner in watch mode, and see values next to your code. No setup required.

Wallaby Team sponsor

Hotkey 2.2: Declarative Keyboard Shortcuts for HTML — Set a data-hotkey attribute on your elements to quickly add keyboard shortcuts. v2.2 improves Mac alt/option support.

GitHub

Is Text or Binary? 7.0 — This library first tries to determine from a filename if the contents of the associated file are likely to be binary or text. Failing that, it can then look at the actual data to figure it out.

Bevry

<browser-window>: A Web Component to Create Pretend Browser Windows on the Web — A lightweight themed zero-dependency web component wrapper to emulate a Safari-like browser window within a Web page. The page full of demos might give you some ideas for its use.

Zach Leatherman

Add Authorization, MFA, Biometrics to Your JavaScript App in Minutes

FusionAuth sponsor

lossless-json: Parse JSON Without Losing Numeric Information — JSON.parse can trip over when it comes to large numbers, so this library parses numeric values not as regular numbers but in a lightweight lossless way keeping the value as a string.

Jos de Jong

Vueform: An Open Source Form Framework for Vue.js — This has been around for a while but is now MIT licensed. Its ancillary form builder app stays commercial, but isn’t mandatory for using the library. GitHub repo.

Vueform

sweetalert2 v11.9 – Customizable, accessible replacement for alert()

YouTube.js 7.0 – Wrapper around YouTube’s internal API.

eslint-plugin-unicorn 49 – Over 100 useful ESLint rules.

NOTABLE QUOTABLE

“If it doesn’t work, it doesn’t matter how fast it doesn’t work.”

___
Mich Ravera

💛 And something else we love

Val Town 3.0: A Social Way to Write and Deploy TypeScript“If GitHub Gists Could Run, and AWS Lambda Were Fun” is a fantastic description for this online platform where you write tiny bite size functions (‘val’s) to be run in V8 isolates. You can connect them together, schedule them, serve them up over HTTP, and more. Version 3 is a big jump for the platform, adding JSX support, more standardized JavaScript approaches to solving problems, and the ability to edit and run your ‘vals’ locally.

Steve Krouse

TypeScript 5.2, Node 20.6, and Astro 3.0

#​653 — September 7, 2023

Read on the Web

😅 We’re back! After two weeks enjoying the blistering desert heat of Las Vegas and downpours of Storm Hilary, I’m ready to get back to the weekly JavaScript roundups – fingers crossed we’re here each week till Christmas now 🙂
__
Peter Cooper and the Cooperpress team

JavaScript Weekly

Astro 3.0 Released: The All-in-One Web Framework — An increasingly popular, turbo-charged site generator comfortable with not just static sites, but dynamic and interactive ones too by way of its ‘islands’ approach. You can use React, Vue, Svelte, Solid, and others, with it, and v3 adds View Transitions API support (more on that here) which can result in striking creations like this Spotify ‘clone’. It requires a play to really ‘get it’ but it’s great.

Astro Team

Good news – now SvelteKit supports the View Transitions API too 😉

Node.js 20.6 Released with Built-In Support for .env Files — The official release post covers everything new in 20.6, but the highlight is support for .env environment files to set environment variables dynamically when a script is run without requiring a third-party library like dotenv.

Phil Nash

Simplify Security and Compliance for Your Apps — Introducing Pangea: comprehensive API-based security services for developers. Effortlessly integrate foundational security services like Authentication, Authorization, and Audit Logging to create a safer app experience and accelerate your time to market.

Pangea sponsor

Bye to Rome and Hi to Biome for JS Formatting and Linting — First announced in 2020, Rome is/was an ambitious effort to create a unified frontend dev tool to bring ideas from Babel, ESLint, webpack, etc. into one place. After forming a company around Rome and raising money two years ago, things seem to have gone awry, with its key maintainers forking the project as Biome.

Emanuele Stoppa and the Biome Team

⚡️ IN BRIEF:

Version 1.0 of Bun, the notably fast JavaScriptCore-based JS runtime, is due to launch in the coming hours. There’s a livestream and, we assume, a launch post due to land here very soon.

In other ‘alternative runtime news’, the Deno team has announced native npm support on its Deno Deploy platform. They’ve also announced Deno KV is in open beta.

Mozilla: “Over the course of the year Firefox has improved by around 40% on the Vue.js benchmark” – find out why.

David Heinemeier Hansson, the creator of Ruby on Rails, announced that they’re dropping TypeScript from Turbo (a library commonly used with Rails) in favor of plain old JavaScript. Social media drama ensued.

What’s going on with the Gatsby React framework? Folks are noticing there’s not a lot going on with it lately and that 🐦 Netlify layoffs had a big impact. Netlify does, however, say 🐦 updates are coming.

GitHub has made changes to its homepage feeds. Quite a few people are unhappy about it, though.

“The CSS-in-JS sector has plateaued,” says the latest State of CSS survey.

What’s new in Svelte as of September 2023? Quite a lot.

🎉 RELEASES:

TypeScript 5.2 – Complete with the much awaited using declarations..

Node-RED 3.1 – The powerful low-code/visual programming environment gets some key improvements in its editor.

jq 1.7 – It’s not JavaScript, but surely the best JSON processing tool to exist.

Ky 1.0 – Simple HTTP client based upon Fetch for browsers, Node & Deno.

jQuery 3.7.1 – Oh yes indeedy 🎉

Cypress 13

📒 Articles & Tutorials

Making Sense of React Server Components — This is fantastic and exactly what it says on the tin, – we’ll be focusing on it more in next week’s React Status newsletter though 😉

Josh W Comeau

You Don’t Need to Learn Svelte – Here’s Why — I mean.. you kinda do, but Kavii’s excitement is infectious and Svelte’s approach remains refreshing.

Kavii Suri

item: Using Labeled Loops in JavaScript — If using labels gives you flashbacks to BASIC and GOTO statements, I sympathize, but in JavaScript, labels open up an interesting control flow technique. More about this on MDN. continue item;

Ben Nadel

Build a Documentation Chatbot with ChatGPT and EdgeDB — Let’s do it using EdgeDB’s intuitive data model & query language, as well as its powerful TypeScript query builder.

EdgeDB sponsor

A Wide View of Automated Testing in React Apps — A straightforward and to the point introduction to why you might use automated testing, how to get going in the scope of a React app, and what to be testing.

The React Handbook

How to Create a Dual-Mode Cross-Runtime JavaScript Package — Specifically, supporting both ESM and CommonJS, and across runtimes like Node, Deno and the browser.

Hexagon

Benchmarking 24 CSV Parsing Approaches — The most extensive CSV parsing benchmark I’ve seen. The author is himself the creator of the μDSV CSV parsing library and wanted to check out the common ‘lightning fast performance’ claims of other libaries.

Leon Sorokin

The Complexity of Building an Efficient Node.js Docker Image — It’s possible to get huge reductions in image size and build time and Samuel shares his approach here, but he also questions whether all this work should be necessary.

Samuel Bodin

Learn High-Level Compilers, Tools, & Techniques – in JavaScript!

Dmitry Soshnikov Education sponsor

14 Linting Rules To Help You Write Asynchronous JS Code

Maxim Orlov

How to Create a Chrome Extension in 10 Minutes Flat

James Hibbard

🛠 Code & Tools

Peaks.js 3.0: View and Interact with Audio Waveforms — A JavaScript component for browser-based audio waveform visualization that comes from the BBC’s R&D department. There’s a live example on the homepage. GitHub repo.

BBC

🎸 SVGuitar: Create SVG-Based Guitar Chord Charts — Why not continue with the musical theme? 😁 You can experiment with this one via this live demo.

Raphael Voellmy

FormKit 1.0: The Open-Source Form Framework for Vue — Ships with production-ready scaffolding like inputs, forms, submission and error handling, and validation rules.

FormKit, Inc.

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

Plate: Roll Your Own Slate-Based Rich-Text Editor — A framework for building React-based rich text editors where you can select the specific features and functionality you need. GitHub repo.

Ziad Beyens

Math.js: An Extensive Math Library for Node and Browser — Work with complex numbers, fractions, units, matrices, symbolic computation, etc. A long standing library now, but continuing to get frequent updates. GitHub repo.

Jos de Jong

Calendar.js: A Calendar Control with Drag and Drop — A responsive calendar with no dependencies, full drag and drop support (even between calendars) and many ways to manage events with recurring events, exporting, holidays, and more.

William Troup

💻 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.

npm-to-yarn – Convert npm commands to yarn and vice versa.

export-to-csv – Export arrays of objects to CSV.

Marked 8.0 – Fast Markdown parsing library. (Demo.)

Perfectionist 2.0 – ESLint plugin for sorting various data.

React Native Vision Camera 3.0
↳ Powerful camera control for React Native apps.

YouTube.js 6.3
↳ Client library for YouTube’s internal API.

Ink 4.4 – Use React to build CLI apps.

Prisma 5.2

ffmpeg.wasm 0.12.6