2023 N|Solid Awards: The Top 10 Best Node.js Open Source Projects to Watch

NodeSource has been a part of the Node.js ecosystem since 2014, contributing to the open-source project, distributing binaries (over 100m annually!), providing expert Node Services, and building tooling (N|Solid) to support developers to make the best software leveraging Node.js. Every year, we look at the open-source projects we believe are the most interesting and will impact the ecosystem. This year we decided to recognize each of these projects with an award, so welcome to the first installment of the N|Solid Awards!

As the technology has become more ubiquitous in recent years, the list of Node.js projects and technologies to keep an eye on in 2023 is growing longer. As champions of Node, we are excited to see the creativity of the developers using Node.js and the positive impact the technology has in the world.

Node.js, a JavaScript open-source runtime environment, has become one of the most popular platforms for developing applications. With the rapid rise of Node.js usage, developers are constantly pushing the boundaries of what’s possible with the platform. As a result, many open-source Node.js projects are available for everyone to tinker around with.

“JavaScript is everywhere, including in 98% of the world’s websites. Representing this enormous developer ecosystem is a humbling and awesome responsibility. The work of our maintainers matters, as they keep lavaScript safe and modern for those who depend on it.” – OpenJS Foundation

Before we get to the award winners, here. A quick list of the pros and cons of Node.js:

Pros and Cons of Node.js

The pros of Node.js include the following:

Flexibility – Node.js is designed to be used with many different types of applications;
Speed – Node.js is faster than other server-side languages;
Scalability – Node.js makes it easy to scale applications;
Great ecosystems – Node.js has a large and vibrant community of developers constantly building new libraries and tools;
Async I/O – Node.js is built on the concept of asynchronous I/O, which makes it great for handling multiple requests simultaneously.
Cost savings – Node.js can reduce hosting and maintenance costs.

The cons of Node.js include the following:

Single threading – Node.js is single-threaded, which can limit performance;
Compatibility issues – As Node.js is updated, older versions may not be compatible with newer libraries and frameworks;
Lack of debugging

Skilled professionals like experienced Node.js developers require tools to get their jobs done quickly and effectively. However, it can be challenging to make the right choice from the range of options available. Node.js is known for its strong community that offers many tools. Such additions have been instrumental in contributing to the success of modern apps. To help you narrow down your choices, here are some of the top open-source projects you should keep an eye on.

The Winners of the N|Solid Award for 2023!

Selected for the project’s importance and value and the team’s outstanding effort, here are 10 of the best open-source projects (in no particular order) worth keeping an eye on…

Fastify-vite
Mercurius
Platformatic
Next.js
Prisma
Redwood
Nuxt
Strapi
Herbs.js
PNPM

Fastify-vite

Fastify-Vite is a minimalistic web framework designed to build modern web applications quickly. It supports React and Vue at the moment, which means you can use the same familiar components, lifecycle hooks, and other patterns. With its lightning-fast performance, developers can quickly develop, test, and deploy web applications.

Note: And if you ask, Why is fastify-vite but no vite itself? Because according to our lead engineers, it “is a game-changer in SSR” (And if we wanted to present the top 10, well, we couldn’t go on, to be honest, 😅🤷‍♀️); however, we are fans of the great work done by this project, so here: Vite itself has a special mention in our list.

And if we talk about Vite, then we cannot leave the Fastify ecosystem aside.

Fastify

Fastify is an open-source web framework for Node.js that enables developers to create modern and efficient web applications quickly. It provides a great foundation to build the application logic while abstracting away much of the complexity associated with web development. Fastify has an extensive ecosystem of modules, plug-ins, and tools that can be used to improve the development process. These include web servers, logging, validation, authentication, security, routing, and more. With such a wide range of features, Fastify makes it easy to create secure, reliable, and performant web applications.

Mercurius

Mercurius is a Node. a js-based project focusing on bringing IoT to the edge. It is designed for distributed IoT devices and provides tools for connecting them to cloud services such as Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform. It also supports real-time streaming, analytics, machine learning, and more. Mercurius provides an easy-to-use API that allows developers to quickly and easily interact with their devices. Furthermore, Mercurius is open-source and free to use, making it an ideal choice for developers who want to create innovative IoT solutions.

Platformatic

Platformatic project in Node.js is a powerful and scalable platform that enables businesses to quickly create, deploy, and manage sophisticated customer experiences using the power of AI. Node.js is used to incorporate custom logic into Platformatic’s interactive environment, allowing for a more tailored user experience for customers. Node.js is also used to provide faster performance and improved scalability across the platform, which is essential for powering high-volume customer interactions. With Node.js at its core, Platformatic project in Node.js delivers an efficient, robust, and secure customer experience.

Next.js

Next.js is an open-source project used to build server-side rendered React applications. It is based on the React framework and is a popular choice for developing single-page applications. It is easy to start with Next.js, as it handles the configuration and provides built-in features such as server-side rendering, static site generation, routing, code splitting, and much more. It also enables developers to start building apps quickly and efficiently while providing a range of customization options.

Prisma

Prisma is an open-source project that provides an ORM (Object Relational Mapping) for Node.js applications. It is designed to make it simpler and easier to interact with databases, reduce complexity and pain points in the development process, and help developers quickly build and deploy robust applications. Prisma provides automatic schema management, powerful data modeling, scalability, and high-performance querying.

Redwood

Redwood is a full-stack JavaScript framework for building web, mobile, and desktop applications. It allows you to rapidly use modern technologies like React, Node.js, GraphQL, and TypeScript to create powerful applications with an opinionated yet extensible architecture rapidly. With Redwood, you get the best of both worlds: the robustness and scalability of a full-stack framework and the flexibility and efficiency of a modern JavaScript stack.

Nuxt

Nuxt is an open-source project built on Vue.js and Node.js that provides an easy-to-setup framework for server-side-rendered (Universal) or Single Page Applications (SPA). It supports Vue components and allows developers to create custom projects from scratch or pre-made templates. Nuxt comes with integrated routing, code-splitting, and hot module reloading out of the box and also provides features such as custom layouts, meta tags management, and server middleware.

Strapi

Strapi is an open-source Node.js project that allows developers to create and manage their own API’s with ease. It provides a RESTful API structure and a customizable admin panel that will enable users to manage content and users easily. Additionally, it supports multiple databases and can be easily extended with plug-ins. Strapi provides an intuitive user experience and allows for rapid development of web applications.

Herbs.js

Herbs.js is a Node.js project that helps developers streamline the development process by allowing them to quickly and easily create Node.js applications with the help of various pre-defined tools, libraries, and modules. It provides a wide range of features, such as code syntax highlighting, modular components, integrated debugging and testing, and a streamlined build process. It also offers a convenient command-line interface for creating and managing a Node.js project.

PNPM

PNPM is an advanced package manager for node.js. It is optimized for performance and focuses on being a minimal footprint and making dependency resolution faster by creating a hard link, symlink, or cloning the dependencies into the local project. It also features an automated garbage collection system that detects and removes unnecessary packages. PNPM is designed to create reproducible and reliable builds. It utilizes a deterministic package-lock file to ensure that the same version of all required packages is installed on each machine.

Congratulations to the projects and their teams, you are doing truly incredible work, and we are excited to see what you do throughout the year! If you would like to nominate a project for the N|Solid Award, reach out to our community team at [email protected] and tell us why!

Why Choose N|Solid on top of Node.js?

Companies and developers looking for an enterprise-grade Node.js platform should consider N|Solid due to its superior performance and scalability. N|Solid delivers up to 10x better performance than most other Node.js production platforms and offers a range of tools to help developers scale their applications quickly and easily.

Additionally, N|Solid solves the problem of missing debugging capabilities, offering advanced insights, profiling capabilities, and real-time monitoring with built-in alerting, so developers can quickly identify and fix issues. It also includes a range of additional features, such as progressive deployments, automated patching, secure log data transmission, and more. Read about the top ten features in N|Solid here!

Conclusion

Node.js is a powerful platform that can help you create the project of your dreams. With plenty of open-source projects available, you can find solutions to develop exceptional applications. From the top ten NodeJS open-source projects, you have the opportunity to try out something new or contribute actively.

It is possible to get overwhelmed by all the options, but this is a fantastic opportunity to build and experiment with the tools you need.

Please help us to reach more people and support use cases in Node.js. We care about the Node.js community! Happy to connect with you on

Twitter

LinkedIn,

GitHub.

You’re welcome to explore, read, and participate in the Node.js Project.
We proudly support Node.js Binary Distributions since 2014. 💚

Vite 4.0 released

#​618 — December 9, 2022

Read on the Web

JavaScript Weekly

Vite 4.0 Released — From the same creator as Vue.js, Vite is an exciting piece of frontend tooling offering lots of goodies out of the box: fast hot module replacement, instant server starts, optimized builds with Rollup, TypeScript and JSX support (more on why to use Vite here). You can even give it a quick spin online via vite.new.

Evan You and Vite Contributors

Anjana Vakil on the JavaScript Fundamentals — This video course covers the core skills needed to become a professional JavaScript programmer, including writing reusable code with functions, conditionals, fetching data from APIs, and more. It’s everything you need to continue your journey to become effective at JavaScript.

Frontend Masters sponsor

npm Gains New Security Features — GitHub continues its work in making the npm ecosystem safer. Two new things: granular access tokens so package owners can better control access to publishing workflows, and a new code explorer to look directly at the contents of packages from the official npm site.

Monish Mohan (GitHub)

Console Ninja: console.log Output Right Next to Your Code — A VS Code extension that displays console.log output and runtime errors next to your code. Jack Herrington recorded ▶️ a neat 6 minute intro showing it off recently.

Wallaby.js Team

IN BRIEF:

There’s a React documentary in production – ▶️ here’s the trailer.

AWS has unveiled Step Functions Distributed Map, a way you can run hugely parallel (up to 10,000 simultaneous executions) operations (written in JavaScript, perhaps) over data and documents stored on S3.

A quick look back 27 years to the launch of JavaScript in 1995.

📊 D3 7.7, the latest version of the popular data visualization framework, is out and I wanted to recommend looking at co-creator Mike Bostock’s notebooks if you want inspiration on using D3, a look at new features, etc. He posts interesting stuff.

The JS debugger in the latest VS Code release now supports console.profile for CPU profiling code, as well as nested sourcemaps.

RELEASES:

Rome 11Linter in urbe novissima sunt.

Storybook 7.0 beta 0

Rollup 3.7 – ES module bundler.

xv 2.0 – Zero-config Node test runner.

Nx 15.3 (A huge news update post.)

Ember 4.9

Bun 0.3 – The challenger JS runtime.

📒 Articles & Tutorials

Sandboxing with PartytownPartytown provides a way to run third party scripts within a Web Worker rather than on the main thread. Could this be used for sandboxing? Weston tried it out and concluded it’s not quite there.

Weston Ruter

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

Stream sponsor

Is Prisma Better Than Your ‘Traditional’ ORM?Prisma has become a very popular ORM option in the Node space in recent years. The creator of the Practica Node starter app considers if Prisma makes sense as a universal ‘go to’ ORM. No, but..

Yoni Goldberg

When to Use gRPC vs GraphQL — A balanced comparison of two popular API protocols to see where each works best.

Loren Sands-Ramshaw

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

▶  A Discussion on Optimizing Your JavaScript with Rust — A chat with Vercel’s Lee Robinson at the recent Next.js conference.

Ben Popper podcast

🛠 Code & Tools

Codux: A Visual IDE for React — One of the co-founders of Wix introduces a new standalone tool to accelerate the React development process. It currently only supports Chromium-based browsers but you can take it for a test drive or learn more from its homepage.

Nadav Abrahami (Wix)

Harlem 3.0: Simple Extensible State Management for Vue 3 — Provides a simple functional API for creating, reading, and mutating state.

Andrew Courtice

Open Source Firebase Alternative for Web, Mobile, and Flutter Devs

Appwrite sponsor

JS Image Carver: Content-Aware Image Resizer and Object Remover — Uses the seam carving approach (if you’ve used ‘Content Aware Scale’ in Photoshop, you’ve seen it). The live demo on this one is fun to watch.

Oleksii Trekhleb

Civet: The CoffeeScript of TypeScript? — If you liked CoffeeScript back in the day, here’s the same idea in a modern TypeScript-oriented form.

Daniel Moore

Maska 2.1: Zero-Dependency Input Mask — Happy in vanilla situations, but can also integrate with Vue 2/3. GitHub repo.

Alexander Shabunevich

node-calls-python: Call Python from Node — One use case the author mentions is plugging into Python’s rich ecosystem of machine learning tools.

Menyhért Hegedűs

reduced.to: Open Source URL Shortening App Built with Qwik — The app itself is live at reduced.to but you might find it interesting as an example of a frontend built using the Qwik framework.

Ori Granot

📺 Yesterday, This Dot Media published Qwik’s creator Misko Hevery giving ▶️ a live coding introduction to Qwik – a useful way to get up to speed.

💻 Jobs

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

Stimulus

Senior UI Dev — Join us and innovate with MicroFrontends, custom Node tools, build systems (Webpack/Github Actions), TypeScript, React, and more with a11y and DX in mind.

Vertex Inc

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

Spacetime 7.3
↳ Lightweight JavaScript timezone library.

Partytown 0.7.3
↳ Run intensive third-party scripts in a worker.

Splitter 1.4
↳ React component for split views.

reveal-md 5.4
↳ Reveal.js presentations from Markdown files.

Mongoose 6.8
↳ MongoDB object modeling library.

React Tooltip 5.0