Tag: syntax

Comparing test assertion styles in JavaScript

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#​657 — October 5, 2023

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JavaScript Weekly

An Interactive Intro to CRDTs — Conflict-free replicated data types (the so-called CRDTs) provide a popular approach to replicate data across numerous clients and allow live collaboration between them without conflicts. This post really digs into what makes CRDTs tick well, complete with interactive examples.

Jake Lazaroff

Test Assertion Styles in JavaScript — Isaac, fundamental to the development of npm and the growth of Node, shares his thoughts on the two main approaches common in JavaScript testing APIs and which he prefers best.

Isaac Z. Schlueter

Free Course: Land a Software Engineering Role — Jerome Hardaway has helps over 300 folks get a software development job — now he shares his advice in this video course — featuring resume tips, networking advice, how to optimize your GitHub profile for technical scrutiny, and more.

Frontend Masters sponsor

🔵 TypeScript 5.3 beta has been released with improved support for import attributes, improved type narrowing in numerous situations, and inlay hints in VS Code can now jump you to the type’s definition.

🔐 npm provenance is now generally available on the main npm registry. Here’s a live example.

🎨 Adobe officially launched its version of Photoshop for the Web last week and Addy Osmani wrote a great post showing off all the web technologies it took to make it happen. The modern browser is a powerhouse!

🏠 In June we featured val.town, an interesting site where you can write and deploy TypeScript in a social and serverless fashion. Big changes are coming in the shape of Val Town v3. A platform to watch.

🤔 Was JavaScript really made in 10 days? It’s complicated.

⚠️ The forthcoming ESLint 9.0 is a significant enough release that you might want to prepare your custom rules for it in advance.

🎉 RELEASES:

Node v20.8.0 (Current) – Key performance improvements for streams.

Sinon 16.1 – Provides test spies, stubs and mocks.

Astro 3.2, Redux Toolkit 1.9.7, and pnpm 8.8

📒 Articles & Tutorials

‘Strong Static Typing, A Hill I’m Willing to Die On…’ — Starting off with TypeScript and moving on to Rust, the author shares why he feels so strongly that when it comes to having static types in a language, there really is no argument. (This then led to extensive discussion on Hacker News.)

Tom Hacohen

📗  The Story of Third-Party JavaScript (The Book) — Manning published a book by Ben Vinegar and Anton Kovalyov ten years ago that was entirely focused on writing JavaScript to run on other people’s sites – quite apt as the authors worked at Disqus at the time! This post isn’t about the topic itself but goes deep into how the book came together and how well it did.

Ben Vinegar

📅  JetBrains JavaScript Day 2023: A Virtual Event You Won’t Want to Miss — Get up to speed with modern JavaScript and TypeScript development in just one day.

JetBrains sponsor

Working with a TypeScript Monorepo with npm Workspaces — npm’s workspaces feature makes it easier to manage multiple packages within a single top-level package/monorepo.

Dmitry Kudryavtsev

Test Your React Libraries Locally with Yalc — Yalc simplifies the process of working with and ‘publishing’ packages entirely locally so you can try things out without publishing to a remote, and potentially public, registry.

Andrew Israel (PropelAuth Blog)

▶  Let’s Create a Filter Table Component in Vue

Andrew Schmelyun

Integrating Slonik with Express.js — A type-safe Postgres client library.

Gajus Kuizinas

Next.js 13 vs Remix: A Case Study

Prateek Surana

Using the Intl Segmenter API

Kilian Valkhof

🛠 Code & Tools

Tailwind Elements 1.0: 500+ Bootstrap Components Recreated with Tailwind — Claims to offer more functionality compared to Bootstrap and follows a ‘minimal’ Material-esque design language for user familiarity. Easily integrates with Angular, Vue, etc.

Tailwind Elements

Lite YouTube Embed 0.3: A Faster Youtube Embed — Faster than the official one, at least. v0.3 implements reliable autoplay. There’s a live demo here.

Paul Irish

Day.js: A 2KB Immutable Date Library — Pitched as a Moment.js alternative with a mostly compatible API, Day is a smaller library for parsing, validating, manipulating, and displaying dates and times.

iamkun

Stop Feeling Lost and Inefficient When Debugging via console.log — See console.log output and runtime errors alongside your code. No config, no setup, no hassle. Supports Vite, Bun, Webpack, Next.js, Remix, and more.

Wallaby Team sponsor

Viselect: Let Users Visually Select DOM Elements — If you’ve got a variety of elements and you want users to be able to select them in groups, individually, or even in multiple groups, this lets you offer that functionality easily. Can be used in a vanilla fashion or with integrations for React or Vue.js.

Simon Reinisch

Tailwind Next.js Starter Blog 2.0: A Starter Template for a Next.js Blog — An up-to-date template using the modern Next.js app directory structure along with server components. A full explanation of the updates.

Timothy Lin

Kaluma: A Tiny JS Runtime for the Raspberry Pi Pico — Can you get a JavaScript runtime into the 64KB necessary to run on the Raspberry Pi Pico (which uses the RP2040 microcontroller)? Kaluma can.

Kaluma Project

sort-on 6.0: Sort Arrays on an Object Property — Short & sweet. Samples.

Sindre Sorhus

Craft.js 0.2: A React Framework for Building Drag and Drop Page Editors — It’s a bold move to make the landing page for your project be a text editor itself, but we like it. GitHub repo.

Prev Wong

Create Collaborative Apps Like Figma and Miro in Days with Ably

Ably sponsor

📅 React Native Big Calendar 4.3 – A Google Calendar/Outlook-style large calendar control.

📊 Lightweight Charts 4.1 – High performance financial charting for canvases. Release notes.

CKEditor5 40.0 – Commercial rich text editor framework. Now with an AI assistant feature.

article-extractor 8.0 – Extract article content for a URL in Node.

Shaka Player 4.5 – Library to play adaptive media formats (DASH, HLS and MSS).

Ziggy 1.7 – Use Laravel named routes in JavaScript.

Marked 9.1 – Markdown parser & compiler.

💻 Jobs

Apply Now and Work #LikeABosch — Our promise to our associates is rock-solid: we grow together, enjoy our work & inspire each other. Join in & feel the difference.

Bosch

Frontend Developer 🚀 (Remote, Work from Anywhere 🏖️) — Enjoy TypeScript, React, GraphQL and performance? Join in building our super-fast headless commerce service with a beautiful UI.

Crystallize

🎁 A VS Code Bonus

Awesome VS Code: A Curated List of Themes and Extensions — Yep, it’s one of those ‘awesome’ lists, but it’s packed not only with links to themes and useful extensions, but it has screenshots for most of them too. Skim through, something will jump out at you.

Valerii Iatsko

Microsoft spills the tea on TypeScript

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#​655 — September 21, 2023

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JavaScript Weekly

▶  TypeScript Origins: The Documentary — You know you’ve made it when you get your own documentary! This has just dropped but is well produced, packed with stories from TypeScript’s co-creators, users, and other folks at Microsoft, and kept me entertained. It goes particularly deep into the motivations and process behind its creation, including why Microsoft felt it was worth pursuing.

OfferZen Origins

🔥 The takes get spicer 25+ minutes in as various TypeScript users chip in with their opinions, and even Daniel Rosenwasser, now program manager of the TypeScript team, says he initially worried that Microsoft might “f**k it all up.” 😅 Ryan Dahl pops up about an hour in too.. so I hope you’ve got some time spare.

Patterns for Reactivity with Modern Vanilla JavaScript — When data changes, you often want to do things, and the process that makes that happen is reactivity. While many libraries or frameworks like React or Vue offer reactive solutions out of the box, you can do it all with vanilla JavaScript too, and this post digs into many of the patterns you might need to use, complete with examples.

Marc Grabanski

Handsontable: Data Grid With Spreadsheet Superpowers — There are a lot of JavaScript data grids out there, but none are quite like Handsontable. Its Excel-like design, keyboard shortcuts, and navigation make it the perfect tool for developers.

Handsontable sponsor

Deno 1.37: Modern JavaScript in Jupyter Notebooks — Not content to let Bun take all the headlines, Deno has come up with something pretty neat here. Deno 1.37 ships with a Jupyter Notebook integration so you can create interactive REPL sessions but using the JavaScript you know and love, rather than Python.

The Deno Team

JavaScript Minification Benchmarks — A frequently updated benchmark suite and results comparing the speed and quality of JavaScript minification across a variety of tools including esbuild, Babel, Bun, SWC, and Uglify.

Hiroki Osame

⚡️ IN BRIEF:

The Svelte team offers a sneak peek at the forthcoming Svelte 5 and introduces the idea of ‘runes’: “Like every other framework, we’ve come to the realisation that Knockout was right all along.”

Happy 27th birthday to JScript! JScript was a version of JavaScript that Microsoft put into IE 3.0 primarily to avoid trademark issues around the name of JavaScript. No-one cares much about that anymore, despite Oracle still technically holding the JavaScript trademark.

Folks are discussing whether Node.js needs a mascot of its own.

Want to support anyone doing great work on JavaScript projects? You can nominate them for a GitHub Star.

If you rely upon the npm package download counts at all, the daily counts for all packages was zero on September 13 and 14 (example). Why? “This issue remains under investigation,” says npm support.

🎉 RELEASES:

Remix v2 – Popular full stack web framework.

Bun 1.0.2 – Bugfixes, faster bun –watch, it now uses V8’s Date parser, and Fastify apps now work too.

Node.js v20.7 (Current) – Multiple –env-files now supported.

Next.js 13.5 – Faster, faster, faster.

📒 Articles & Tutorials

Getting Network Activity Under Control with Priority Hints — A look at how browsers can prioritize the loading of resources, how you can explicitly specify a priority when using fetch, and how different ways of loading scripts are prioritized.

Alex MacArthur

Securing Node Apps by Analyzing Real Command Injection Examples — When code can be manipulated to run unintended, arbitrary commands, it’s never going to end well.

Liran Tal

🚀  Coming Soon: Fixed-Cost Monthly Maintenance by UpgradeJS.com — Too much tech debt in your JavaScript app? Let us help. Slow and steady upgrades at your own pace. Releasing next week.

🌳 Bonsai by UpgradeJS.com sponsor

🧭  What’s New in Safari 17 — Safari 17 is now in beta on iOS 17 with the final release dropping across all of Apple’s platforms next week. On the JavaScript front, Safari and WebKit now fully support the Storage API, WebGL in Offscreen Canvas, v flag support on regexes, Set operation methods, URL.canParse, plus the much anticipated support for PWAs in macOS Sonoma.

Jen Simmons and the WebKit team

Testing Out the Alpine.js Intersect Plugin — A wrapper for the Intersection Observer API.

Raymond Camden

▶  How to Make Forms in Angular Reusable

Decoded Frontend

Clean Layout Architecture for Vue Applications

Fotis Adamakis

Incremental Static Regeneration for Angular

Enea Jahollari

🛠 Code & Tools

fx 30: The Go(lang)-Powered Terminal JSON Viewer — Yes, it’s written in Go, but fx has long been a useful tool for looking at JSON files, and it has just been rewritten from the ground up with a new look, regex search, fuzzy search, and support for “even the most massive JSON files.” You don’t need to worry about Go at all; it’s simply a fantastic tool for looking at JSON.

Anton Medvedev

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

Wallaby.js sponsor

Mantine 7.0: The Popular React Component Library — A big release for what is now one of the most popular React component libraries. As of v7, Mantine no longer relies on Emotion and components come with native CSS files, all components now support the system-set color scheme, CSS modules are now the default way to style components, and there are many smaller enhancements too.

Mantine Team

Chrono 2.7: A Natural Language Date Parser — Give it a string like “today”, “last Friday”, “2 weeks from now”, or even an entire date and time, and it’ll come up with a date object to suit.

Wanasit Tanakitrungruang

Theatre.js 0.7: Motion Design for the Web — Can be used both programmatically or via a visual editor to animate objects created with things like Three.js, React Three Fiber, HTML/SVG, or even just tween variable values.

Theatre.js Project

Track Errors and Performance Issues in Every Part of Your Stack

Sentry sponsor

Swup: A Flexible Page Transition Library for Server-Side Rendered Sites — A library that benefits hugely from checking out the demos. v4.4 adds experimental ViewTransition support.

Georgy Marchuk

Create Chrome Extension: A Scaffolding Tool for Chrome Extensions — Similar to create-react-app or Yeoman, this is specifically for starting extension development, with support for several frameworks, HMR, and light/dark modes.

Yalda

💡 Chrome Extension CLI is another option in this space.

Neutralinojs 4.14.0 – Imagine something like Electron but without the browser engine being bundled in. Supporting Linux, Windows, and macOS, it instead leans on what’s already present.

📅 React Lite Month Picker
↳ An elegant way to let users select a specific month.

React-Virtuoso 4.6 – Powerful virtual list component.

Faker 8.1 – Generate large amounts of fake data.

🔊 Peaks.js 3.1
↳ The BBC’s audio waveform UI component.

Ember.js 5.3

💻 Jobs

Nest.js Back-End Developer — Lead the development of a HealthTech platform, focused on Caregiver support. TypeScript, Nest.js, PostgreSQL, AWS, React/Next.js.

Carallel

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

“The best programs are the ones written when the programmer is supposed to be working on something else.”

___
Melinda Varian

TypeScript 5.2, Node 20.6, and Astro 3.0

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#​653 — September 7, 2023

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😅 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

Taking JavaScript into Python

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#​650 — August 3, 2023

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JavaScript Weekly

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

Veritas

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

VanJS 1.0: A 1KB Reactive UI Framework Without React/JSX — VanJS is particularly light and elegant, and its author has put some serious effort into documenting it and offering tools to convert your HTML to its custom format. This week’s v1.0 release is a relatively big step forward for what is still a young project. GitHub repo.

Tao Xin

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

SpreadJS from GrapeCity sponsor

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

Will Pringle

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

Andy Jiang (Deno)

⚡️ IN BRIEF:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Axiom sponsor

🎉 RELEASES:

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

Shoelace 2.6 – Popular suite of agnostic UI Web Components.

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

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

📒 Articles & Tutorials

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

Alice Moore (Vercel)

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

Matt Pocock

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

Storyblok sponsor

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

José Dapena Paz (Igalia)

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

Dave Rupert

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

Kliton Bare

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

Kirupa Chinnathambi

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

Darius Cepulis (Mux)

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

Marko Stanimirovic

🛠 Code & Tools

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

egoist

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

Ricardo Valdovinos

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

FusionAuth sponsor

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

Sahat Yalkabov

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

Nathan Gordon et al.

💻 Jobs

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

🛸 Emerge Tools

Find JavaScript Jobs with Hired — Hired makes job hunting easy-instead of chasing recruiters, companies approach you with salary details up front. Create a free profile now.

Hired

🧑‍💻 Got a job listing to share? Here’s how.

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

Andrey Sitnik

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

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

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

Tremor 3.6 – React library for building dashboards.

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

React Image Gallery 1.3 – Image gallery carousel component.

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

🐴 Let’s hit the Oregon Trail

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

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

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

Felix Rieseberg, Apple, et al.

Name mangling

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#​649 — July 27, 2023

Read on the Web

JavaScript Weekly

Hono + Htmx + Cloudflare: A New Stack? — A lot of people seem to be jumping on htmx lately as an alternative to the complexity of frameworks like React, but what if you want to keep using JSX? Hono is a (vaguely Express-like) Web framework targeting edge function use cases and includes middleware for rendering JSX. Yusuke gives a quick example of how all this can come together with Cloudflare Workers and D1 for a simpler, full-stack JS experience.

Yusuke Wada

Shrinking VS Code with Name Mangling — There’s a fair bit of JavaScript in VS Code but the team has managed to reduce the size of the shipped code by almost 4MB without actually doing any deleting or refactoring thanks to a new ‘name mangling’ build step. This is a great read on how the team approached things and got it working.

Matt Bierner

New Course: The Hard Parts of UI Development — Develop an under-the-hood knowledge of UI development by learning techniques such as data binding, UI composition, templating, virtual DOM and its reconciliation, and hooks, all from scratch!

Frontend Masters sponsor

Microsoft TypeChat: An Approach for Type-Safe LLM Responses — A new project with some prominent names attached (the designer of C# and PM for TypeScript, for starters) that demonstrates the excitement within MS for large language models (LLMs). TypeChat aims to work around the problem of LLMs outputting hard-to-parse natural language and to direct such output into a predictable, typed form.

Hejlsberg, Lucco, Rosenwasser et al.

⚡️ IN BRIEF:

🐦 React/Redux’s Dan Abramov is leaving Meta. Having achieved so much and reaching a point where he feels ready to move on, Dan is departing Meta but will remain on the React team as an independent third party. 💙

📘 The Concise TypeScript Book is, unsurprisingly, a guide to using TypeScript. More surprisingly, it’s all on GitHub and free to read. Hurrah.

Tixy is an interactive page for learning logic, math and expressions by solving puzzles using a visual grid. It starts off very simply, but gets elaborate quickly. This is a neat way to pick up some of the skills needed for Dwitter.

JSPlayground is a new Web-based JavaScript sandbox tool.

Is the term ‘Jamstack’ finished? Brian Rinaldi wonders.

🎉 RELEASES:

Bun 0.7 – The JavaScriptCore-based alternative JS runtime adds (experimental) Vite support, Web Workers support, and includes a –smol option to run in memory constrained environments (with a significant memory reduction shown off in the post).

Astro 2.9 – The ‘zero JS by default’ framework adds experimental support for view transitions and more.

Neutralinojs v4.13.0 – Lightweight cross-platform desktop app framework.

Remix 1.19 – Modern full-stack JS framework.

Node.js v20.5.0 (Current)

📒 Articles & Tutorials

💛  ‘Good Code is Like a Love Letter to The Next Developer Who Will Maintain It’ — “The beauty of our creations, however, is not judged solely by the elegance of our algorithms or the efficiency of our code, but by the joy and ease with which others can build upon our work.”

Addy Osmani

More practically, Addy also tells us to stick to ‘boring architecture’ for as long as possible.

📅  React Native EU Conf with Guenther Steiner: Book Last Regular Tickets

Callstack sponsor

How to Build a GPT-3 App with Next.js, React, and GitHub Copilot — GitHub doesn’t often run tutorials on its blog, but they appear keen to promote the idea of a modern Copilot-oriented development process, and this certainly shows off some of the potential.

Kedasha Kerr (GitHub)

Upgrading an Ancient React App

Jeffrey Carl Faden

🛠 Code & Tools

a11y-dialog 8.0: A Lightweight, Accessible Way to Create Dialogs — Supports alert dialogs as per WAI-ARIA, nested dialogs, and provides both a DOM and JavaScript API. There’s a live CodeSandbox demo you can play with. v8.0 no longer supports IE, if that’s important to you.

Kitty Giraudel

Mapkick.js: Interactive Maps in One Line of JavaScript — Supports Mapbox and MapLibre. It also comes in Python and Ruby variants targeting server-side rendered use cases.

Andrew Kane

RxDB – Local Database For JavaScript Applications — With RxDB you can build realtime applications with great performance that even works when your users are offline.

RxDB sponsor

PLJS: JavaScript Language Plugin for Postgres — PLV8 is the ‘go to’ extension to use JavaScript within Postgres, but this QuickJS-based variant, from the same creator, is more compact, easier to maintain, and may be enough for your needs.

Jerry Sievert

Twin 3.4: Use Tailwind Classes in CSS-in-JS Libraries — Twin v3 introduced full Tailwind plugin support, and v3.4 adds a new SolidJS preset as well as styled-components 6 support.

Ben Rogerson

Praxis: An iOS Browser That Blocks JavaScript — Well, that’s certainly one way to fight back against prompts, modals, and battery sapping scripts, but it won’t work with every site..

Arnold Sakhnov

Spectacle 10: A React and JSX-Based Presentation Library — Got a presentation coming up? Build your decks with JSX, perhaps. GitHub repo.

Formidable

💻 Jobs

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

🛸 Emerge Tools

Find JavaScript Jobs with Hired — Hired makes job hunting easy-instead of chasing recruiters, companies approach you with salary details up front. Create a free profile now.

Hired

🧑‍💻 Got a job listing to share? Here’s how.

gridstack.js 8.4
↳ Framework agnostic dashboard layout and creation.

amqp-client.js 3.0
↳ AMQP 0-9-1 client for both Node and browser (via WebSocket).

FingerprintJS 4.0
↳ Browser fingerprinting library. No longer open source.

MQTT.js 5.0 – MQTT client for Node and browser.

🙈 Taking things too far..

We’ll support anyone who’s keen to reduce the amount of needless JavaScript that goes over the wire (👋 Astro or Qwik) but sometimes, just sometimes, you can go too far with the endeavor to almost comedic effect:

😱  Implementing Tic Tac Toe with 170MB of HTML — Unsurprisingly, the demo (which we’ve not linked to here) brought my browser to a crashing halt, but it’s fun to see a developer take on the challenge of using Chrome’s support for popovers and the state of said popovers along with a huge pile of HTML to handle a game of Tic Tac Toe. Don’t repeat this in production, folks..

Gareth Heyes

The tale of how static typing came to JavaScript

Posted on by

#​648 — July 20, 2023

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JavaScript Weekly

pkg-size: Find the True, Current Size of an npm Package Without Leaving Your Browser — A beautifully designed site that can show you the true size of an npm package (including dependencies) using the actual packages which are ‘installed’ in a browser-based WebContainers-powered environment. Hiroki has 🐦 a Twitter thread where he explains more about how it works.

Hiroki Osame

TypeScript and the Dawn of Gradual Types — From GitHub’s ReadME project comes a thorough journalistic take on how static typing made it into the JavaScript world, what TypeScript offers, some alternative approaches, and the possibility of adding type annotations to JavaScript iself.

Mike Melanson (GitHub)

Create a Real-Time Multi-Host Livestream with Amazon IVS — Amazon Interactive Video Service (Amazon IVS) enables developers to create dynamic video experiences, such as collaborative livestreams with multiple hosts. Click here to learn more.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) sponsor

Storybook 7.1: The Workshop for Building UI Components — v7.1 introduces in-app onboarding for your newest team members, zero-config styling support for Tailwind, MUI, styled-components and MUI, Vue 3 source snippets, and more.

Storybook Team

Five Inconvenient Truths about TypeScript — A brief dose of reality for a world seemingly obsessed with TypeScript: “If you want to get into TypeScript, don’t think you can leave JavaScript behind. It will find you, and it will get you.”

Stefan Baumgartner

🎉 RELEASES:

Fresh 1.3 – The Deno web framework. Plugins can now inject routes and middleware into apps, there’s Deno.serve support, and you can create async route components.

Downshift 8.0 – Primitives to build WAI-ARIA compliant React autocomplete, combobox & select components.

Node.js v18.17.0 (LTS) – Node 18 gets the Ada 2.0 WHATWG URL parser.

Fastify 4.20 – The fast, low overhead web Node.js framework.

⚡️ IN BRIEF:

The Promise.withResolvers proposal has progressed from stage 2 to 3 at TC39, as has the array grouping proposal, as well as source phase imports.

🗣 The folks on Hacker News discussed why the site isn’t being indundated with links to new JavaScript frameworks recently. Has React ‘won’? Has AI stolen the limelight? Or is a JavaScript revolution quietly brewing..?

👴🏻 A blog post from 1996 popped up telling us about the newest JavaScript features in Netscape 3.0 – definitely a blast from the past. Say hello to the typeof operator!

📒 Articles & Tutorials

‘How We Generate JS and Python SDKs from a Canonical Rust SDK’ — PostgresML is an extension that adds machine learning functions into Postgres. Its team loves and prefers Rust but most of its users are using JavaScript or Python. What to do? Simultaneously write multi-language libraries using Rust..

Silas Marvin (PostgresML)

💡 Psst.. if you use Postgres at all, we have a Postgres newsletter too!

Updating Code with jscodeshift — TypeORM is an ORM for Node that introduced some breaking changes requiring the author to update lots of calls in his code. A perfect time to use a ‘codemod’ to automate the job. Even if you don’t use TypeORM, this post might give you some ideas for other places to use such an approach.

Clinton Blackburn

AI-Proofing Your Career For Tomorrow: Free Session by Interview Kickstart — Discover Your AI Career Path (AI/ML vs Data Science). Take an informed decision: Insights from FAANG+ AI/ML Engineers. Register for a free session.

Interview Kickstart sponsor

How React 18 Improves App Performance — If you’ve not entirely kept up with how things have changed or developed in React with regards to concurrent rendering, transitions, Suspense, and even React Server Components, this is a fantastic review and primer to get up to speed on how React’s newer features dramatically help with performance.

Lydia Hallie (Vercel)

300ms Faster: Measures Taken to Reduce Wikipedia’s Total Blocking Time (TBT)

Nicholas Ray

On the Origins of JSX and Why It Exists

Hristiyan Dodov

🛠 Code & Tools

wavesurfer.js 7: Audio Waveform Player — If you’re creating a podcast player, audio experience, or anything where seeing an interactive audio waveform could be useful, check this out. GitHub repo.

katspaugh and contributors

TOAST UI Grid: A Customizable Grid Control for the Web — A powerful MIT-licensed grid-style control for the display, editing, and management of data. It comes from the same folks as TUI Editor and TUI Calendar and while it’s happy on its own, there are wrappers for Vue and React too. GitHub repo.

NHN

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

Wallaby.js sponsor

Pines: A Library of UI Components for Alpine.js and Tailwind Projects — Includes sliders, tooltips, accordions, modals, and others. The CSS-only components are usable in any Tailwind project while the ones that require JS are designed for use with Alpine.js.

devdojo

YouTube.js 5.5: A Wrapper Around YouTube’s Private API — One of those things you’d expect to be quickly blocked somehow, but it’s 18 months old, so… 😆 The fun isn’t just for Node or Deno users – it’ll work in the browser if you can proxy the requests through your own server.

LuanRT

Eruda 3.0: A Console for Mobile Browsers — If you’re in a situation where you have no access to DevTools, you can add Eruda to your page and it provides a sort of virtual devtools you can use from any browser, including on mobile.

LiriLiri

Reagraph 4.10: WebGL Graph Visualization Library for React — Here’s a basic code example. This week’s release adds support for three dimensional clustering. GitHub repo.

REAGRAPH

brotli-wasm 2.0: A Brotli Compressor and Decompressor — Covers both Node and the browser by means of WebAssembly.

HTTP Toolkit

Pacquet: A New, Experimental Package Manager for Node — From a Node.js core member, no less.

Yagiz Nizipli

Shareon 2.2
↳ Lightweight, stylish ‘share’ buttons for social networks.

Helipopper 8.0
↳ Tooltips and popovers for Angular. (Demos.)

Ink 4.3
↳ React for interactive command-line apps.

📅 React Calendar 4.4

♖ React Chessboard 4.0

💻 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.

🎵 Thank you for the music..

Chip Player JS: Browser-Based MIDIs, MODs and Game Music — The creator of this site has, like me, a fascination with old digital music – MIDI files, trackers, and the like. Rather than keep an old computer running, he decided to build a browser based music player for such files.

Matt Montag

P.S. If you’re looking for something specific to listen to, the music by famed Norwegian tracker Jogeir Liljedahl is well worth a try – particularly Overture or Guitar Slinger. Or how about Donkey Kong Country’s dreamy Aquatic Ambience? It’s striking how trackers managed to squeeze so much down into a few hundred kilobytes by the heavy reuse and manipulation of samples.

Microsoft shrunk the TypeScript

Posted on by

#​640 — May 25, 2023

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JavaScript Weekly

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

Microsoft

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

Rafael Gonzaga

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

Bryntum Grid sponsor

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

The Deno Team

⚡️ IN BRIEF:

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

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

RELEASES:

Astro 2.5

Preact 10.15 – Fast 3KB React alternative.

TypeScript 5.1 RC

Electron 24.4

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

???? Articles & Tutorials

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

Eli Bendersky

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

Mohamed Rasvi

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

Daniel Shiffman and Olivia Guzzardo

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

FusionAuth sponsor

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

Joscha Neske

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

Dr. Axel Rauschmayer

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

Mark O’Neill

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

Kamil Konopka

???? Code & Tools

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

Bytecode Alliance

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

Alex Grozav

Dynaboard: A Visual Web App IDE Made for Developers — Build high performance public and private web applications in a collaborative — full-stack — development environment.

Dynaboard sponsor

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

TypeCell

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

Michael Andreuzza

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

Lucas Löffel

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

Argos CI

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

Juan Luis Paz Rojas

React Authentication, Simplified

Userfront sponsor

Hashids.js 2.3
↳ Generate YouTube-like IDs.

Tabulator 5.5
↳ Interactive table and data grid control.

gridstack.js 8.2
↳ Dashboard layout and creation library.

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

ReacType 16.0
↳ Visual prototyping tool that exports React code.

Mongoose 7.2 – MongoDB modelling library.

Eta (η) 2.2 – Embedded JS template engine.

AVA 5.3 – Popular Node test runner.

MelonJS 15.3 – HTML5 game engine.

???? Jobs

Find JavaScript Jobs with Hired — Hired makes job hunting easy-instead of chasing recruiters, companies approach you with salary details up front. Create a free profile now.

Hired

Fullstack Engineer at Everfund.com — Push code, change lives. Help us become the center for good causes on the modern web with our dev tools.

Everfund

????‍???? Got a job listing to share? Here’s how.

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

→ Check out Node Weekly here.

Transformers: JavaScript in Disguise

Posted on by

#​630 — March 17, 2023

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JavaScript Weekly

????  Transformers.js: Running ML Models in the Browser — Transformers are a type of machine learning model often used for natural language or visual processing and while running such models directly in the browser is in its infancy, Transformers.js opens up some ML models to you with some impressive demos here.

Xenova

????  Celebrating 10 Years of Electron — It feels like Electron pops up everywhere (Slack, Spotify, VS Code, and more) so it might feel surprising it’s only been with us for a decade. Slack and Electron developer Erick Zhao gives thanks to Electron’s developers, the community, gives us a bit of Electron related history, and reassures us Electron is still going strong.

Erick Zhao

Dynaboard: A Visual Web App IDE Made for Developers — Build high performance public and private web applications in a collaborative — full-stack — development environment.

Dynaboard sponsor

Announcing TypeScript 5.0 — Note that TypeScript doesn’t follow semantic versioning, so this is as much a ‘major’ release as 4.9 was.. but 5.0 looks cool anyway. This release of the typed JavaScript superset is packed with features like decorators, improved ESM project support for Node and bundlers, const type parameters, and more.

Daniel Rosenwasser (Microsoft)

Turbowatch: File Change Detector and Task Orchestrator — Not just that but it claims to be extremely fast and “if you ever wanted something like Nodemon but more capable, then you are at the right place.” This looks very promising and the README is full of examples.

Gajus Kuizinas

IN BRIEF:

BREAKING NEWS: The JS Party podcast has just dropped an episode called ▶️ The Future of React – so new, we haven’t listened to it, but it features Dan Abramov and Joe Savona so may make for good weekend listening..

“The most dangerous command you run every day: npm install” says Socket, who are introducing what they call ‘safe npm’, a transparent wrapper around npm designed to, well, make it less dangerous.

CORRECTION: In issue 627 we suggested the ECMAScript 2023 spec had entered a new draft stage. TC39 member Jordan Harband pointed out to us that it has been in such a state for some time. “There’s still a stage 4 PR not yet merged,” he noted, but there will be some progress in the next month.

Defer is a new ‘zero-infrastructure’ background jobs platform for Node.js apps.

Recently we linked to ???? Dittytoy, a fun online JavaScript environment for audio coding/experiments. Someone has somehow implemented an entire Commodore 64 SID synthesizer in it!

????  Developer Day: A Front-Row Seat to What’s New with Retool

Retool sponsor

RELEASES:

Node.js v19.8.0/1 (Current)

Jasmine 4.6
↳ Testing framework for browsers and Node.

pm2 5.3
↳ Popular Node production process manager.

Mongoose 7.0
↳ Popular MongoDB ODM for Node.js.

ESLint 8.36

???? Articles & Tutorials

Chrome 111 Gains a ‘View Transition’ Feature for SPAs — The View Transition API is only supported by Chrome so far, but allows easy animated page transitions within single-page apps (demo here). Luckily it suits progressive enhancement so you can start using it right now without feeling too guilty 😉 Multi-page app support is forthcoming.

Jake Archibald (Chrome Developers)

Create and Download Text Files with JavaScript — If you want your code to be able to generate a text (such as JSON) file on the fly and have it downloaded by the user’s browser, it’s reasonably easy.

Amit Merchant

Five Mistakes I Made When Starting My First React Project — Richard shares his early React mistakes with the hope you can learn from his misfortunes. He tackles topics like using defaultProps, propTypes, and class components.

Richard Oliver Bray

Too Much Tech Debt in Your node_modules? Our Team of JS Devs Can Help — We are a team of senior software engineers who specialize in tech debt. Let us modernize your JavaScript stack ????

UpgradeJS.com | JavaScript Upgrade Services sponsor

Progressively Enhancing a Table with a Web Component — Building a web component wrapper to add table sorting.

Raymond Camden

Shell-Free Node.js Scripting with Execa 7.1 — Execa is a popular process execution library for Node and the latest version includes an interesting $ method feature for writing zx-style scripts with it, making it even more useful for shell scripting style usecases.

ehmicky

What is Vite and Why Use It Over Create React App?

Luke Twomey

Pointers on Upgrading from Cypress v9 to v12

Gleb Bahmutov

How to Use v-model with Form Inputs in Vue

Dmitri Pavlutin

How to Create and Use Path Aliases in TypeScript Imports with Vite

Hasibul Hasan

What Is Deno and How to Use Its Sandbox?

Roman Zaynetdinov

???? Code & Tools

Template: A Simple Framework for Webapps — The author built it for his own projects, but notes: “It’s a joy to work in, feels “frameworky” but it’s just web standards with <100 lines of convenience JS wrapped around it. There is no magic beyond what the browser provides – I like it that way.” We do too.

William Blankenship

React ProseMirror: Integrate the ProseMirror Editor with React — ProseMirror is a toolkit for building rich text editors for the Web.

The New York Times

Breakpoints and console.log Is the Past, Time Travel Is the Future — 15x faster JavaScript debugging than with breakpoints and console.log, now with support for Vitest.

Wallaby.js sponsor

Fable 4.0: F# to JavaScript Compiler — If you fancy F#’s flavor of almost-entirely-functional development, this could be for you. GitHub repo.

Fable

MiniSearch: Small In-Memory Fulltext Search Engine for Browser and Node — The strength is that the indexed data is stored locally, allowing it to work offline and giving good performance, as seen in this demo.

Luca Ongaro

css-variable: Tiny Treeshakable Library to Define CSS Custom Properties in JS — Compatible with popular CSS-in-JS libraries like Emotion, styled-components, Linaria, etc., and it boasts better CSS minification and smaller virtual DOM updates, among other features.

Jan Nicklas

Tremor 2.0: The React Library to Build Dashboards Fast — Provides an array of modular components to build data-driven dashboards. v2.0 is the “first step towards a production-ready version of Tremor” and sees a full switch to Tailwind CSS. Homepage.

Tremor Labs

Stable Diffusion Plugin for Photoshop — Writing code that worked with Adobe’s weird JS variant was ghastly, but this uses their new ‘UXP’ based approach, so is interesting enough for that alone. This plugin also opens up the Stable Diffusion generative art system to Photoshop users.

Abdullah Alfaraj

Flexboard: A React Component Library for Resizable Sidebars — Try the live example. The code allows you to set min/max sizes for the resizable parts of the layout.

Dorbus

???? Jobs

Full Stack JavaScript Engineer @ Emerging Cybersecurity Startup — Small team/big results. Fun + flexible + always interesting. Come build our award-winning, all-in-one cybersecurity platform.

Defendify

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

Sticker Mule

Find JavaScript Jobs with Hired — Hired makes job hunting easy-instead of chasing recruiters, companies approach you with salary details up front. Create a free profile now.

Hired

????‍???? Got a job listing to share? Here’s how.

Fuite 2.0
↳ Tool for finding memory leaks in web apps.

???? wavesurfer.js 6.6
↳ Navigable waveform built on Web Audio & canvas.

Svelte-Inview 4.0
↳ Svelte action that monitors when an element enters/leaves the viewport.

Discord.js 14.8
↳ Library for using the Discord chat API.

Plotly.js 2.20
↳ Powerful charting library. (Examples.)

Recharts 2.5
↳ React + D3 charting library. (Examples.)

deepmerge 4.3.1
↳ Merges the enumerable properties of objects.

Vue Testing Library 7.0

React Table Library 4.1

JavaScript sans build systems?

Posted on by

#​626 — February 17, 2023

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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

Bringing JavaScript to WebAssembly

Posted on by

#​625 — February 10, 2023

Read on the Web

It looked quiet at first but wow, what an epic week this turned out to be. There’s a lot to chew on here, and we even have a variety of bonus items at the very end of this issue. Enjoy!
__
Your editor, Peter Cooper

JavaScript Weekly

Speeding Up the JS Ecosystem: It’s ESLint’s Turn — Last year we featured an article from the same author about how he was finding, and fixing, low-hanging performance fruit in popular JavaScript projects. He’s back, and he’s found a lot of potential for savings in ESLint this time.

Marvin Hagemeister

The Future (and the Past) of the Web is Server Side Rendering — It’s fair to say the Deno folks have some skin in this game, but nonetheless this is a neat brief history of server-side rendering and why they feel it’s the right approach for modern web development.

Andy Jiang (Deno)

Monitoring Your NestJS Application with AppSignal — With AppSignal, you can monitor your NestJS app with ease and rely on OpenTelemetry to handle third-party instrumentations. AppSignal even provides helper functions to help you build comprehensive custom instrumentation. A box of 🍪 included!

AppSignal sponsor

Ten Web Development Trends in 2023 — Following the State of JS survey results Robin takes a considered look at new web dev trends that we should be paying attention to this year, and why they matter.

Robin Wieruch

Bringing JavaScript to WebAssembly for Shopify Functions — As much as this is focused on a specific use case at Shopify, this is a fascinating look at how they’re integrating JavaScript and WebAssembly under tight constraints. They also talk about Javy, a JS to WebAssembly toolchain being built at Shopify that lets you run JS code on a WASM-embedded JS runtime.

Surma (Shopify)

Google Touts Web-Based Machine Learning with TensorFlow.js

Richard MacManus (The New Stack)

IN BRIEF:

🎉 Time to celebrate — a recent survey allegedly found that JavaScript applications ‘have fewer flaws’ than Java and .NET ones. So there you go.

Honeypot’s highly anticipated ▶️ React.js documentary drops later today – it’ll probably be out by the time you read this.

Vanilla List is a directory of ‘vanilla’ JavaScript controls and plugins.

▶️ Evan You tells us what to expect in 2023 from Vue.js.

The Scala.js project is celebrating its ten year anniversary – it’s now a mature way to build Web projects using Scala, if you prefer.

📅 Vue.js Live is a JavaScript event taking place both in London and online on May 12 & 15. From the same folks as the also forthcoming JSNation conference.

A history of criticisms levelled at React.

RELEASES:

Eleventy / 11ty 2.0
↳ Popular Node.js static site generator.

pnpm 7.27 – The efficient package manager.

RxDB 14.0 – Offline-first, reactive database.

📒 Articles & Tutorials

Design Patterns in TypeScript — OO-inspired patterns aren’t for everyone or every use case, but this is a fantastic catalog of examples, complete with diagrams and explanations, if you need to learn to tell apart factory methods from decorators, facades, or proxies.

Refactoring Guru

Resumable React: How To Use React Inside Qwik — Building React apps without ever loading React in the user’s browser? “Sounds too good to be true? Let’s see how this works.”

Yoav Ganbar

Did You Know That You’re Already a Distributed Systems Developer?

Temporal Technologies sponsor

Build a Hacker News Client using Alpine.js — Alpine.js is a thin and elegant reactivity library that lets you add dynamic functionality to your site directly in markup. This is a short and sweet practical example of what you can quickly do with it.

Salai Vedha Viradhan

▶  TypeScript Speedrun: A Crash Course for Beginners — If you want to pick up TypeScript and would find a video guide useful, this is for you. Matt has become well known recently for his educational TypeScript tweets and videos, and this is another good one that flies through the basics. (23 minutes.)

Matt Pocock

Using Notion as a Headless CMS with Nuxt

Trent Brew

The Options API vs Composition API in Vue.js

Charles Allotey

🛠 Code & Tools

Bookmarklet Editor: Easily Work on JavaScript Bookmarklets — Useful because who can remember the exact syntax for a bookmarklet? 🤔 This also can instantly convert code to and from bookmarklet form and includes some examples in the help section (click the big ? to get all the details).

Marek Gibney

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

Yup 1.0: Super Simple Object Schema Validation — Define a schema, transform a value to match, assert the shape of an existing value, or both. Very extensive docs here.

Jason Quense

Material React Table: A Full-Featured React Table Component — Built upon Material UI 5 and TanStack Table 8. The docs include lots of interactive examples.

Kevin Van Cott

BlockNote: Notion-Style Block-Based Text Editor — Built on top of Prosemirror and Tiptap, this is for you if you like the way the Notion note-taking service’s text editor feels. There’s a live demo.

Yousef

TresJS: Build 3D Experiences with Vue.js — Create 3D scenes with Vue components and Three.js. Think React-three-fiber but Vue flavored.

Alvaro Sabu

depngn: Find Out if Dependencies Support a Given Node.js Version — A CLI tool that establishes whether or not the dependencies in your package.json will work against a specified version of Node.

OmbuLabs

Open-Source JS Form Libraries to Automate Your Form Workflow — Self-host SurveyJS to configure and modify multiple forms, convert them to fillable PDF files, and analyze collected data in interactive dashboards.

SurveyJS sponsor

Lawnmower: Build VR Scenes with Custom HTML Tags — A web component library that leans on Three.js and aims “to make building a basic VR website as easy to make as your first HTML site”.

Gareth Marland

Electron 23.0 Released — The popular cross platform JavaScript, HTML + CSS desktop app framework gets bumped up to Node 18.12.1, Chromium 110, and V8 11.0. Windows 7/8/8.1 support has also been dropped, so we might start to see those versions of Windows lose the support of a lot of Electron based apps soon.

Electron Core Team

Run: Run User-Provided Code in a Web Worker

SLASHD Analytics

💻 Jobs

Software Engineer (Backend) — 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

QUICK RELEASES:

vue-easytable 2.23
↳ A data table/grid control for Vue.js. (Demo.)

React-Custom-Scroll 5.0
↳ Customize the browser scroll bar. (Demo.)

react-jsonschema-form 5.1
↳ Component to build Web forms from JSON Schema.

AlaSQL.js 3.1
↳ JavaScript-based SQL database.

jest-puppeteer 7.0
↳ Run tests using Jest & Puppeteer.

MDX 2.3
↳ Markdown for the component era.

🎁 The Bonus Round

✈️ Watching someone wrestle with Python and JavaScript to fly (virtual) planes with Microsoft Flight Simulator tickled me a lot.

A beautiful WebGL2-based fluid simulation. It’s even happy on mobile. Pretty!

Go-like channels in 10 lines of JavaTypeScript..?

🐦 Misko Hevery: “useSignal() is the future of web frameworks and is a better abstraction than useState(), which is showing its age.” (source)

Mike Pennisi asks: when is an object property not a property?

Do you use Postgres at all? Check out Postgres Weekly – one of our sister newsletters. So much is going on in the Postgres space lately and it’s a great way to keep up.