Tag: Web Development

The unbearable weight of massive JavaScript

Posted on by

#​664 — November 23, 2023

Read on the Web

JavaScript Weekly

Time to Take the State of JavaScript 2023 — The long standing State of JavaScript survey is back for another run at figuring out what the community is up to and what tools we’re using. The results are always illuminating and we’ll share the tastiest parts once available.

Devographics

▶  The Unbearable Weight of Massive JavaScript — An extensive talk looking at what can be achieved by simplifying web architecture, chiefly by using new or upcoming Web Platform APIs and getting back to building fast, maintainable, user-friendly frontends. Slidedeck.

Ryan Townsend

Stop Building Auth, Start Building Apps with EdgeDB + Next.js — It’s hard enough to come up with an idea worth trying. See how EdgeDB and our new authentication extension makes it easy to go from idea to working application in record time using Next.js.

EdgeDB sponsor

TypeScript 5.3 Released — The latest edition of the type-enhanced JavaScript superset is here. The headline feature is full support for the import attributes proposal (as it currently stands, at stage 3 in TC39), but there are many enhancements around type narrowing, interactive inlay hints for types in editors, and more. Not the biggest update, but progress nonetheless.

Daniel Rosenwasser (Microsoft)

Vite 5.0 Released — The Vite suite of frontend tooling may have started life in the Vue.js world, but is now used by projects aplenty including SvelteKit, Remix, and Astro. v5 now uses Rollup 4, removes many deprecated features, and requires Node 18+. There’s a migration guide to help with your v4 to v5 progression.

Evan You and Contributors

IN BRIEF:

The Node.js 20.x runtime is now available on AWS Lambda.

🎁 A bumper list of dev-related tools & services running Black Friday deals.

GitHub looks at what’s new in the latest Git release: Git 2.43.

The AWS Amplify team teases ‘Gen 2’ of their fullstack app platform.

RELEASES:

⭐️ Transformers.js v2.9 – State of the art ML in JavaScript. v2.9 adds support for depth estimation, zero-shot object detection, and optical document understanding.

Redux Toolkit 2.0 rc.0, Redux 5.0 rc.0, React-Redux 9.0 rc.0 – Initial RCs with better packaging and smaller bundles. Final releases due soon.

Bun 1.0.14 – Introduces a high-perf globbing API for matching files and strings.

Rspack 0.4 including Rsbuild 0.1 – A fast Rust-based web bundler.

Node v21.2.0 (Current) and Node v20.10.0 (LTS)

Starlight 0.13.0 – Beautiful docs sites atop Astro.

📄 Articles & Tutorials

▶  4 Web Devs, 1 App Idea — Salma Alam-Naylor, Scott Tolinski, and Eve Porcello join Jason Lengstorf to kick off a fun new series where several developers all implement the same type of app, show off how they went about it, and react to each other’s approaches. Svelte, Astro, and Next.js each make an appearance.

Learn with Jason

Promises Training — Practice working with promises through a curated collection of interactive challenges. Aimed at developers with at least an intermediate understanding of promises who want to dig deeper.

Henrique Inonhe

JavaScript Error and Performance Monitoring — Track, trace, debug and resolve JavaScript errors across platforms. Are your releases that easy? Join us live.

Sentry sponsor

An Attempted Taxonomy of Web Components — A collection of open-source web components (and lessons learned from using them) that may help you on your journey in this complex, developing space.

Zach Leatherman

Using OpenAI APIs to Analyze Automated Test Failures — A look at how to develop a Nightwatch.js plugin which sends the test failure and associated errors to a service that integrates with OpenAI’s platform to analyze said errors and provide actionable feedback.

Andrei Rusu

🛠 Code & Tools

Bruno: An Open-Source HTTP API Exploration App — There are a lot of ‘API client’ tools like this, commercial and non-commercial, with varying levels of features, but this is an open source one entirely built in JavaScript with a fully-offline ethos some might appreciate. GitHub repo.

Anoop M D, Anusree P S and Contributors

debounce 2.0: Delay Function Calls Until a Set Time Elapses — If you don’t want something to run too often, debouncing is the strategy for you and this library makes it simple. v2 adds types and brings the code up to modern standards.

Sindre Sorhus et al.

Level Up Your UX With Bryntum — Empower your users with advanced widgets like data grids, calendars, schedulers, and Gantt charts.

Bryntum sponsor

H3: A Minimal HTTP Framework for Multiple JS Platforms — Aims to be as universal as possible and works across numerous platforms, including Node, while offering the basic HTTP framework features and a compatibility layer with Express middleware. v1.9 just landed.

UnJS

request-animation-frames: Use requestAnimationFrame Anywhere — The latest library from the one-man module powerhouse, Sindre Sorhus. The idea this time is to allow you to use requestAnimationFrame in any JavaScript environment. The implementation is delightfully simple.

Sindre Sorhus

Spectral.js: A More ‘Paint-Like’ Color Mixing Library — If you have two colors to transition between, just tweening the RGB values can result in some rather ugly intermediate colors. Spectral.js uses Kubelka–Munk theory which more closely matches how paints work for a visually satisfying result.

Ronald van Wijnen

‘A Node + TypeScript + ts-node + ESM Experience That Works’ — It’s just three files: package.json, tsconfig.json and a utilities file.

Khalid Zoabi

A Non-Cloud Alternative to Google Forms That Has It All

SURVEYJS sponsor

🖼 medium-zoom 1.1: A Library for Medium-Style Image Zooming — Responsive, can load a higher definition version of an image on zoom, and mouse, keyboard and gesture friendly. Now we just need a library that can cover up the bottom half of a page with junk like Medium also does now. Demo.

François Chalifour

gridstack.js 10.0 – Build interactive dashboard panels quickly.

MQTT.js 5.3 – MQTT client for Node and browser.

Piscina 4.2 – Node.js worker thread pool implementation.

(Official) MongoDB Node.js Driver 6.3

SQL Formatter 14.0 – Pretty print SQL queries.

Job Listing

Full Stack TypeScript Software Engineer – [Remote Europe] — Marker.io is a visual bug-reporting tool for the web. Join our dev team and work remotely (Stack: Node.js, Vue.js & MongoDB).

Marker.io

NOTABLE QUOTABLE

“Programming isn’t about what you know; it’s about what you can figure out.”

___
Chris Pine (author of Learn to Program)

P.S. Medium is 🗑️. If you don’t want to host your own blog, try Hashnode, dev.to, Bear, or even throw Markdown at GitHub Gists – it’ll provide a better reader experience and we’ll be more likely to link to it.

Angular is back

Posted on by

#​662 — November 9, 2023

Read on the Web

JavaScript Weekly

Reintroducing Angular with Angular v17 — Angular first appeared in the shape of AngularJS in 2010 and helped launch a wave of large-scale JavaScript frameworks. Angular remains popular in many use cases but is often overlooked in favor of newer options. v17 takes a leap forward in both features and vision, with the team rebranding Angular and repositioning it as a modern solution:

Angular.dev is an all-new docs site and home for the project (the new guides look fantastic). It’s in beta till Angular v18 is released – you can learn more about it here.
Hydration is now production ready.
Vite and esbuild are the default for new projects.
Improved support for creating server side apps.
New, improved built-in control flow to make code less verbose.
Google pulled out all the stops for ▶️ the ‘Special Angular Event’ – an hour of talks, interviews and discussions to bring you up to speed.

Minko Gechev and the Angular.js Team

Bare Metal JavaScript: The JavaScript Virtual Machine with Miško Hevery — Learn how high-level JavaScript turns into low-level CPU instructions. Build up your mental model of JavaScript’s performance characteristics through understanding the JavaScript Virtual machine under the hood!

Frontend Masters sponsor

Mastering DOM Manipulation with Plain JavaScript — A mega collection of hundreds of examples of doing things like selecting text, manipulating elements, resizing things, scrolling, and such – all by using the DOM and browser APIs with no external libraries. You Might Not Need jQuery is another classic resource in a similar vein.

Phuoc Nguyen

▶  Why Signals Are Better Than React Hooks — When Preact’s Marvin Hagemeister pops up in the comments saying “this is by far the best video about signals and why they are so exciting. I love the way you demonstrate it by coding along and moving an app over to signals,” it should bump a video up to the top of the Watch Later playlist.

Web Dev Simplified

👀 Nicholas C. Zakas shares a look at what’s coming in ESLint v9.0. The first alpha is due in a month or two.

⚛️ React has landed a commit adding sourcemaps for prod build artifacts.

🆚 VS Code will soon support moving editors into floating windows.

RELEASES:

TypeScript 5.3 RC – Final due soon, but you get import attributes, resolution-mode in import types, interactive inlay hints for types, and improvements to narrowing in a few extra cases.

It’s a strong week for testing tool releases, so they’re all in one place: TestCafe v3.4.0, Cypress 13.5, Nightwatch.js 3.3, and React Testing Library 14.1.

Deno 1.38 – Many smaller improvements, including far faster JSX transformation.

Bun v1.0.10 – Faster node:http and bug fixes.

tsx 4.0 – Node.js enhanced to run TypeScript / ESM files.

📄 Articles & Tutorials

How to Do a JS to TypeScript Conversion — Chris, who led the conversion of a 150k LOC app to TypeScript, addresses a common question: do-it-as-you-go or follow the dependency graph?

Chris Krycho

Exploring the Headless Component Pattern for Composing React UIs — An engineer at Atlassian takes us on a thorough and practical journey into the concept of headless components and the pattern of having reusable logic and behavior separate from the presentation of UI elements.

Juntao Qiu

📞 Calling JavaScript Devs! Sentry Launch Week is Coming. Join Online

Sentry sponsor

▶  8 Talks from JetBrains’ JavaScript Day 2023 — JavaScript Day is an annual virtual event featuring a handful of talks on diverse JS related topics. This year, Romulo Cintra shows us how TC39 works on language proposals, Stefan Baumgartner spoke about the lies we tell ourselves using TypeScript, and more.

JetBrains

Writing Components That Work in Any Framework — Looks at why web components can be difficult to adopt, and shows how using a higher-level library can let us “easily write components that work everywhere”.

Andrico Karoulla

Build a Lightweight Code Generator with TypeScript and JSON Imports

John Ruble

Deploying a Vue Application with Netlify and GitHub

Ezekiel Lawson (Telerik)

Don’t Disable Buttons, Do This..

Chris Ferdinandi

🛠 Code & Tools

Moveable: A Library for Dragging, Resizing, Scaling and More — If you want to offer up physical manipulation of elements (warping, pinching, rotating, etc.) this library could help. Its homepage is a fun self-demo and there are packages for integrations with common frameworks.

Younkue Choi

🔥 Need to Eliminate Tech Debt Without Falling into Dependency Hell? — Upgrade seamlessly and let us tackle tech debt with our fixed-cost, monthly maintenance service (starting at $2k/month).

UpgradeJS | Tech Debt Services sponsor

🖼  image-dimensions: Get the Dimensions of Images — Sindre’s latest creation is a simple but comprehensive one. A way to get the size (as width and height in pixels) for JPEG, PNG, APNG, and GIFs in any modern JS environment.

Sindre Sorhus

main-thread-scheduling 9.0: Consistently Responsive Apps While Staying on the Main Thread — An easier alternative to Web Workers that uses the approach of stopping heavy tasks on the main thread from executing when the user interacts with the UI. This new version adds afterFrame (like requestAnimationFrame but called after frame drawing has rendered), queueTask, and extensions to promises.

Antonio Stoilkov

React Components for the Google Maps JavaScript API — react-google-maps is the ‘first Google-sponsored library’ for integrating Google Maps JavaScript API components into a React app.

Mike Pegg (Google Cloud)

capture-website 4.0: Capture Screenshots of Websites — A Puppeteer wrapper to capture screenshots of site from Node or the command-line.

Sindre Sorhus

Never Stop Learning and Work #LikeABosch — At Bosch, you always keep growing. Upskill yourself into countless new roles, positions and opportunities. Learn more.

Bosch sponsor

⌘K-sv: A Fast, Composable, Unstyled Command Menu for Svelte — A port of ⌘K, a React-based command menu component.

huntabyte

Vuetify v3.4 – Vue component framework.

MiniSearch 6.2 – In-memory fulltext search engine. (Demo.)

TanStack Form 0.9 – Headless type-safe form state management.

Dependency Cruiser v15.2 – Tool to validate and visualize dependencies.

Valtio v1.12.0 – Proxy state made simple. Plus it has a fantastic homepage.

Helmet 7.1 – Secure Express apps with HTTP headers.

Rollup.js 4.3 – ES module bundler.

NOTABLE QUOTABLE

“The first 90% of the code accounts for the first 90% of the development time. The remaining 10% of the code accounts for the other 90% of the development time.”

___
Tom Cargill

🚀 Everyone’s gone to the moon..

Spacekit.js: A Library for Creating 3D Space Visualizations — Not just any old 3D space, but actual space – think planets, stars, and meteors. A library like this comes, of course, with many examples to try. GitHub repo.

Ian Webster

Big news for both Next.js and Remix

Posted on by

#​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 Support — Remix 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 Generator — Docusaurus 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

Fluid simulation in JavaScript

Posted on by

#​658 — October 12, 2023

Read on the Web

✍️ Due to being on the road at an event, this is a more compact and bijou issue but I’m back at full pace next week 😅
__
Peter Cooper, your editor

JavaScript Weekly

Speeding Up the JS Ecosystem: The Barrel File Debacle — Marvin continues his tour through the world of JavaScript performance fixes with a look at how some innocent looking code can make tools run slower than they should. Test runners and many import cycle detection tools are most affected.

Marvin Hagemeister

🌊  Building a Water/Fluid Simulation in JavaScript — Hard to explain, but a lot of thought and care has gone into this tutorial of sorts. The live demos are nice, too. Uses p5.js behind the scenes.

Kenichi Yoneda

Strongly Typed and in the ⛅: Meet EdgeDB 4.0 — EdgeDB is an open-source database focused on developer experience. It features a high-level, modern data model, integrated schema migrations, and a TypeScript query builder that makes it easy to write advanced, fast queries, putting ORMs to shame.

EdgeDB sponsor

Angular and Qwik’s Creator on How JS Frameworks Handle Reactivity — A summary of Miško Hevery’s keynote from the International JavaScript Conference looking at reactivity across the major frameworks.

Loraine Lawson (The New Stack)

A Web Server ‘Hello World’ Benchmark: Go vs Node vs Nim vs Bun — The standard disclaimer applies: benchmarks are difficult and don’t always measure what you should care about.

Daniel Lemire

👀 Simon Willison has put together a fantastic live demo (in notebook format) showing off how to do client-side object detection in images using solely JavaScript and a neural network. (Note: Be aware this uses a lot of CPU and may slow your browser down.)

▶️ ViteConf 2023 took place last week and some of the talks are already available on YouTube. 🐦 One key bit of news is about Rolldown, a Rust port of Rollup, meaning Vite will get even faster in the medium term.

⚙️ Stephen Röttger of the V8 team has blogged about efforts to enable control-flow integrity (CFI) in V8, essentially a way to reduce the ability of nefarious third parties to exploit V8’s control flow in order to trigger arbitrary shellcode.

⚠️ A look at the potential dangers of regular expressions in JavaScript.

👾 An interesting post mortem of a game built in just 13KB for the JS13K contest.

🎉 RELEASES:

Electron 27 – The cross-platform desktop app toolkit gains Chromium 118, Node.js 18.17.1, and V8 11.8, but loses macOS 10.13/14 support.

Fresh 1.5 – A Deno-native framework for building full-stack webapps. v1.5 adds support for partials – the ability to update a portion of an existing page.

Parcel 2.10 – The zero-config build tool gets some serious performance improvements (7x faster on large projects). Devon Govett wrote 🐦 a Twitter thread explaining how.

Bun 1.0.5 – Mostly bug fixes and gentle improvements for the performance-oriented JS runtime. No HTTP/2 yet, but it’s just around the corner..

Solid 1.8 – Declarative and performant reactivity for building UIs.

🛠 Code & Tools

Evidence: Reports Synced to Your Data with SQL and Markdown — An open source, code-based alternative to drag-and-drop business intelligence tools. ▶️ This nine minute screencast does a good job at showing off what it can do.

Evidence

Payload 2.0: A Headless CMS Platform Built on Node — A Node-based headless CMS providing an app framework-like experience, including a customizable React-based admin system, GraphQL or REST APIs, flexible auth and file upload systems, etc. v2.0 introduces Postgres support (in addition to MongoDB), Vite support, and a new rich text editor. GitHub repo.

James Mikrut

Add Figma Like Collaborative Features Without Re-Architecting Your App — Create collaborative features, from live cursors to avatar stacks with Spaces, our in-app collaboration SDK.

Ably sponsor

Visual Studio Code Extension Tester v5.10 — A framework for simulating user interactions with VS Code and its extensions via Selenium Webdriver.

Red Hat

audioMotion-analyzer: Real-Time Audio Spectrum Analyzer — A high-resolution real-time audio spectrum analyzer JavaScript module with no dependencies. Gives a single or dual channel view. (Note the AGPL license.) GitHub repo.

Henrique Avila Vianna

Hotkey 2.1 – Add keyboard shortcuts to pages through HTML attributes (e.g. data-hotkey=”Meta+d”). Built by GitHub and used on github․com itself.

React-Menu 4.1 – Component for building accessible menus and dropdowns.

Ionic 7.5 – Build cross-platform mobile apps with JavaScript.

pnpm 8.9 – The alternative, efficient package manager.

Highlight.js 11.9 – Popular JS syntax highlighting library.

Node.js v18.18.1 (LTS) – To fix a regression in v18.18.0.

💻 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

“The art of debugging is figuring out what you really told your program to do rather than what you thought you told it to do.”

___
Andrew Singer

Taking JavaScript into Python

Posted on by

#​650 — August 3, 2023

Read on the Web

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.

The tale of how static typing came to JavaScript

Posted on by

#​648 — July 20, 2023

Read on the Web

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.

Svelte 4 released

Posted on by

#​644 — June 22, 2023

Read on the Web

JavaScript Weekly

UnsuckJS: Comparing Lightweight JavaScript Options — “No build tools, no compilers, and no hassle.” It’s a table of frontend JavaScript libraries on a simple page – that’s it! But it’s a handy table, letting you see the relative popularity, size, and latest versions of libraries as diverse as Preact, bau, htmx, Hyperapp, and Mithril.

Adam Hill

Svelte 4 Released — Four years on from Svelte 3.0 comes the latest major release of the popular compile-time framework that isn’t afraid to do things its own way. If you’re new to it, hit the interactive tutorial to get a feel for things, or if you’re already a user, enjoy the v3 to v4 migration guide, overhauled site, and extra performance on offer.

Rich Harris and the Svelte Team

🤔 Claudio Holanda’s ‘Thoughts on Svelte(Kit), one year and 3 billion requests later‘ provides some interesting balance to our cheerleading.

The Complete UI Component Library For Enterprise Web Apps — A professional UI component library with power widgets like data grid, calendar, scheduler & Gantt charts. Includes API docs, guides and an unreasonable amount of demos to play with. Seamlessly integrates with React, Angular, Vue & Salesforce apps.

Bryntum sponsor

A Look at TypeScript 5.2’s New Keyword: using — using brings something akin to Python’s with context management into TypeScript by providing a way to automatically run a Symbol.dispose function when an object leaves scope. You could use this to shut down database connections, close file handles, etc.

Matt Pocock

If you’re not a TS fan, the idea behind using is also an ECMAScript proposal (currently at stage 3) called Explicit Resource Management and there’s more detail to enjoy in their examples.

The ‘Getting Started with AI’ Stack — Andreessen Horowitz (a.k.a. a16z) is a well known VC firm, but they also have an engineering team of their own that has come up with a “getting started with AI” template for JavaScript devs who want to play with modern ML technologies without too much thinking about tooling.

Li, Li, and Casado (Andreessen Horowitz)

⚡️ IN BRIEF:

The Register reports malicious actors are exploiting expired S3 buckets to inject harmful code into legitimate npm packages without needing to modify existing code.

Fresh, a Deno-first full-stack Web framework, has a new release in the shape of Fresh 1.2. There have been some concerns over its maintenance, but now there’s a new full-time maintainer, Marvin Hagemeister, and a lot of promise on the horizon. Welcome Marvin!

RELEASES:

Node.js 20.3.1, 18.16.1 and 16.20.1 – Security releases.

React Native 0.72

Nest 10.0 – Popular Node.js framework for building enterprise-grade apps.

ESLint 8.43

📒 Articles & Tutorials

Synchronizing Videos or 3D Model Rotations to Scroll Driven Animations — With just a little JavaScript, you can control 3D models and/or videos using scroll-driven animations. It’s a common effect seen on modern fashion sites.

Bramus van Damme

▶  Recreating a JS Runtime to Understand Node’s Magic — Popular speaker, educator, Microsoft MVP and Node.js core team member Erick gives a very enthusiastic talk on the latest ‘hello world’ in the JavaScript world: building a runtime 😏 Somehow, Erick manages to run through the key concepts involved in just 20 minutes.

Erick Wendel

E-Commerce Simplified — A practical guide to building your Store with Storyblok, Commercetools, and React.js.

Storyblok sponsor

Positioning Anchored Popovers — Popovers are commonly positioned relative to their invoker — but when using the new popover attribute, anchoring can be tricky as these popovers are placed in the top layer, away from the context of their invoker. Hidde looks at options to resolve this.

Hidde de Vries

▶  React Server Components in Under Seven Minutes — Looking to quickly get a basic handle on RSCs? This fast-paced video tries to bootstrap you on the subject.

CodeLit

A Visual Guide to Understanding Node’s Event Loop

Vishwas Gopinath

Where to Host Your Remix App in 2023

Jacob Paris

🛠 Code & Tools

Selecto.js: Make Elements Selectable Within a Drag Area — Let’s say you have a number of elements that represent choices, data, whatever, and you want users to be able to select a subset of them by clicking/pointing and dragging. That’s what this does. Live examples here.

Daybrush (Younkue Choi)

Tuple – The Fastest Way to Onboard New Devs — Waste hours verbally steering on Zoom? New hires learn your codebase faster with Tuple. Trusted by over 40,000 devs.

Tuple sponsor

AutoAnimate: Add Motion to Your Apps with a Single Line of Code — You can view some nice examples on the page and this can be used with React, Vue, Svelte, or just plain JavaScript.

FormKit

Toad Scheduler: In-Memory Node and Browser Job Scheduler — Provides more structure than setTimeout or setInterval and supports cron-style scheduling.

Igor Savin

Kysely: A Fluent, Type-Safe SQL Query Builder — Inspired by Knex and targeting Node, it also works in Deno and the browser and boasts a good autocompletion experience thanks to its fluent API. GitHub repo.

Sami Koskimäki

AI.JSX: A JSX-Powered AI App Framework — It’s not React, but gives a React-like feel to letting you specify how large language models, such as ChatGPT, should integrate with your app. Luckily there’s a set of tutorials.

Fixie.ai

Generate SBOMs Effortlessly with Snyk

Snyk sponsor

💡 An SBOM is a “software bill of materials” – essentially an inventory of dependencies and components that make up an application, as Liran Tal explains.

🐼  Panda CSS: Modern, Build-Time, Type-Safe CSS-in-JS — A new DX-focused CSS-in-JS approach boasting build-time generated styles and type safety out of the box. It works with Remix, Vite, Next.js, Astro, and server components.

Segun Adebayo

React Wrap Balancer 1.0: A Component for Better Displayed Title Text — A component that improves the rendering of titles by avoiding overhanging words. v1.0 is a key release that lets the component use the native CSS text-wrap property when supported.

Shu Ding

Perspective 2.3 – Data visualization and analytics component. The core is written in C++ and compiled to WebAssembly where it can be used from JavaScript.

Tesseract.js 4.1.1 – Pure JS OCR for 100+ languages. Fixes a key bug for processing images taken with iOS devices.

Shoelace 2.5
↳ Well designed, framework agnostic UI component suite.

TestCafe 3.0
↳ Node.js tool to automated end-to-end testing.

AlaSQL 4.1
↳ JS SQL database for browser and Node.

Octokit.js 2.1
↳ GitHub SDK for browsers, Node, and Deno.

💻 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.

11 years of JavaScript on top

Posted on by

#​643 — June 15, 2023

Read on the Web

✍️ Be sure to make it to the end of today’s issue because we have an interview with the creator of Angular and Qwik, Miško Hevery, about exactly what Qwik brings to the modern JavaScript development table. Spoiler: performance and resumability.
__
Your editor, Peter Cooper

JavaScript Weekly

Val Town: If GitHub Gists Could Run, and AWS Lambda Were Fun — I’ve been keeping an eye on this for a few months and it’s a fascinating idea rapidly turning into a useful service that’s going places. You write bite size chunks of JavaScript and Val Town runs them in a sandbox, lets them call each other, lets you schedule them, or serves them up over HTTP. It’s smart and worth a look.

Steve Krouse

The Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2023 Results — Over 90,000 developers took Stack Overflow’s annual survey and it’s all “coming up Milhouse” ▶️ for JavaScript (and TypeScript too, natch) with JS topping the popularity charts 11 years in a row. Its showing is somewhat poorer in the top paying technologies list, but we can’t have it all.

Stack Overflow

Enterprise UI Development: Testing & Code Quality — Managing or migrating large apps and codebases? This video course covers what you need to know to scale efficiently whilst maintaining code quality. Covers unit testing, CI pipelines, mocking, code coverage, and more.

Frontend Masters sponsor

Melange 1.0: Compile OCaml / ReasonML to JavaScript — Having started life as a fork of BuckleScript, Melange now pitches itself as a mature tool for compiling OCaml (a popular functional programming language) to efficient and readable JavaScript.

Antonio Nuno Monteiro, Hongbo Zhang et al.

⚡️ IN BRIEF:

Chrome for Testing is a new, official Chrome ‘flavor’ specifically targeting web testing and automation use cases. You can already use it with Puppeteer.

Angular’s ng-conf event is currently taking place, and the latest news is the release of Angular 16.1 (now with TypeScript 5.1 support), an RFC for a new control flow syntax, and an RFC for built-in declarative lazy loading.

Allegedly, you can’t currently publish npm packages containing the words ‘keygen’ or ‘cheat’ in their names. Hacker News has been discussing it and a response from npm is currently being awaited.

Terence Eden has come up with a way to password protect a static HTML page with no JavaScript but it’s such an odd approach that you might not want to use it in production 😆

RELEASES:

Node.js v20.3.0 (Current)

VS Code May 2023 Edition – Adds a JS refactoring to move a class, function, or constant into an existing file and update all references.

Bun 0.6.9 – Mostly fixes and memory efficiencies for the alternative JS runtime. Nice.

TS-Pattern 5.0
↳ Exhaustive pattern matching library for TypeScript.

NestJS 10.0 – Progressive Node.js app framework. (What’s new.)

📒 Articles & Tutorials

An Introduction to Debugging Tools and Approaches for Node — An informative primer on debugging, from simple things like using IDE extensions to highlight potential problems or, yes, console logging, through to using the V8 inspector and debugging via Chrome.

Craig Buckler

Before Your Next Frontend Pull Request, Use This Checklist — Avoid common mistakes in pull requests with this checklist, covering areas from minimizing bundle size and ensuring accessibility to using semantic markup and keeping code clean.

Nina Torgunakova

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

▶  Nuxt Explained in 100 Seconds — One of Fireship’s typical fast-paced high level roundups. This time they cover Nuxt, the Vue-oriented app framework.

Fireship

How To Build Server-Side Rendered (SSR) Svelte Apps with SvelteKit — SvelteKit is a framework for building apps using Svelte. This post walks through creating a simple job board with it and deploying on Netlify.

Sriram Thiagarajan

▶  Learn Angular Routing in 35 Minutes

Ervis Trupja

🛠 Code & Tools

Motion Canvas: A TypeScript Library and Real-Time Preview Editor to Program Animations — Uses generator functions to procedurally define your animations, and you can try out the web-based editor that allows you to work with the animations visually.

Motion Canvas

Code Together Before You Work Together. Interview Devs in a Real IDE — Skip algorithm interviews & use CoderPad to run coding interviews that are trusted by both candidates and interviewers.

CoderPad sponsor

Threlte: A Three.js Scene Renderer and Component Library for Svelte — react-three-fiber is great, but if you prefer Svelte, this is the alternative for you. It appears to be under very active development too with a whole new version on the way soon. GitHub repo.

Grischa Erbe

Million.js: A Performance-Focused VDOM Replacement for React — Starting life two years ago as a small, library-agnostic virtual DOM implementation, Million has recently presented itself as a performance enhancement for React: “Imagine React components running at the speed of raw JavaScript.”

Aiden Bai

📰 We featured this in this week’s React Status newsletter – if you’re a React developer, we focus more heavily on React news there.

jest-extended 4.0: Additional Matchers for Jest Users — If you’re using Jest for testing, this project introduces a variety of more specific matchers for various situations, particularly around type, value and format checking.

Jest Community

Rewind-UI: Customizable React + Tailwind CSS Component Library — A React component library fitting into the Tailwind CSS way of thinking. You can play with a live demo of some basic customizations on the homepage. It’s in beta but there are about thirty components to sink your teeth into.

Nick Dunas

React Authentication — Without Complexity

Userfront sponsor

⏱🌎  tz-lookup 8.0: Fast Time Zone Estimations from Latitude and Longitude — “This package trades speed and size for accuracy.” If you need to quickly infer timezone from location in Node or the browser, it’s worth a try.

Matthew McEachen

SVG.js v3.2: SVG Manipulation and Animation Library — A lightweight approach without dependencies. There’s a demo on JSFiddle you can play with. GitHub repo.

Various Authors

Vue-ECharts 6.6
↳ Apache ECharts component for Vue.js. (Demo.)

Neutralino.js 4.12.0 – JS desktop app framework.

Mineflayer 4.9 – Create Minecraft bots in JavaScript.

Tremor 3.1 – React dashboard building library.

♖ React Chessboard 3.0 – Yes, a chess component!

React Calendar 4.3

Dehydrating the Web with…
Miško Hevery

Perhaps best known as the creator of Angular, Miško is on a fresh mission with Qwik. Recently reaching v1.0 and focusing on the ‘instant’ delivery of full-stack apps to end users, Qwik takes an interesting approach around ‘streaming’ JavaScript to the client only when needed.

Miško recently shared the full story of Qwik ▶️ on the Stack Overflow podcast, and we wanted to ask him a few questions here too:

What was the key inspiration behind Qwik?

I don’t think there was a “key” inspiration but an accumulation of things that made me realize the current approach doesn’t scale.

We did a lot of work making the Ivy compiler in Angular faster and more capable. While we had a lot of success, the speed wins were not obvious. While Ivy was optimized, the rest of the app was not, and at app startup the code ran without optimization because the VM hadn’t warmed up.

Google has an internal framework called WIZ that powers Google Search, Flights, and Photos. WIZ is great at not executing a lot of code on app startup, and it results in a better user experience.

The realization that code runs more slowly on app startup and that it’s proportional to the amount of JS to execute, is what led me to building a framework that would not need to execute code eagerly on startup. Qwik is the culmination of that goal.

What is Qwik’s biggest differentiator to other frameworks?

Qwik is resumable. Qwik can transfer its internal state from the server to the client, which means that the app can become interactive on the client without having to execute any app-related code eagerly.

Resumablity is at the heart of Qwik. Qwik apps can resume because Qwik knows how to serialize the state of the app and the framework. Other frameworks know how to serialize the app state but not necessarily the framework state.

(Editor’s note: Think Qwik goes into more detail on this.)

Some developers have strong opinions about the use of symbols like $ in names. Did you have any qualms and did you consider any alternatives?

Some people have visceral reactions to $ as it reminds them of jQuery or PHP.

Qwik needs a way to mark closures for extraction. JavaScript doesn’t have an easy syntax for doing this so we needed to come up with our own. $ communicates to the optimizer that it needs to perform code extraction at that location, and also communicates to the developer that special rules apply there too.

We chose $ as it’s one of the few non-alpha characters valid in function names and that does not change the pronunciation of the API.

Misko is CTO at Builder.io and creator of Qwik.

💻 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.

Douglas Crockford calls JavaScript ‘smelly.’

Posted on by

#​642 — June 8, 2023

Read on the Web

JavaScript Weekly

Polywasm: A Polyfill to Run WASM in JS Environments — The creator of esbuild is back with something fresh: a polyfill that uses live translation to be able to run .wasm files in JS environments that either lack a WebAssembly implementation or have it disabled. You can see how it performs in this special version of the esbuild playground.

Evan Wallace

Announcing TypeScript 5.1 — This release of the statically typed JavaScript superset is a gentle ‘quality of life’ step forward rather than a featureful extravaganza, but we get support for linked editing of JSX tag names, namespaced JSX attributes, the ability to have unrelated types for getters and setters, and undefined-returning functions no longer need an explicit return.

Daniel Rosenwasser (Microsoft)

How to Send Password Resets via SMS and Email Using Node.js & Next.js — When you’re building a web application, there’s a decision to make about how to handle users and authentication. There are many services and libraries to choose from, and the right choice will depend on the requirements of what you are building.

Courier.com sponsor

NakedJSX: Use JSX Without React — If you like JSX and would like to use it to help in the production of static HTML without using React itself, this command line tool is for you. It even extracts scoped CSS classes and deduplicates them.

David Hogan

Oh, you can also use NakedJSX to use JSX with jQuery, which you may either find useful or a fun way to troll your team, depending on how you roll. 😏

Dan Abramov Rebuilds React Server Components from Scratch — Having faced a raft of questions about Server Components, Dan has begun to write a series covering everything from the ground up by reimplementing a basic form of RSC from scratch. It’s not aimed at day-to-day React developers, but those who want to grok the ideas behind RSCs.

Dan Abramov

⚡️ IN BRIEF:

⭐️ Douglas Crockford, of JS: The Good Parts fame, ▶️ is back pointing out JavaScript is a ‘smelly’ language and ‘it’s time for the next thing.’ 😬

MDN’s reference pages on regular expressions in JavaScript have been substantially improved.

From Apple’s WWDC this week comes ▶️ a handy presentation on Safari’s DevTools, plus a barrage of news about Safari enhancements around the ‘spatial web’, JPEG XL support, the popover API, offscreen canvas support, local storage policies, extra JS regex features, and more.

Emma Twersky shares everything Angular related from the recent Google I/O 2023 event.

📘 Faraz K. Kelhini’s Text Processing with JavaScript is a new book, currently in beta with a final release due in August from Pragmatic Bookshelf. The table of contents shows it to be packed with useful stuff.

RELEASES:

Tesseract.js 4.1 – Pure JavaScript OCR.

BlockNote 0.8 – ‘Notion-style’ block-based editor.

Redwood 5.3 – React + GraphQL full stack framework.

TensorFlow.js 4.7 – ML in the browser.

Madge 6.1 – Create graphs of module dependencies.

📒 Articles & Tutorials

Why (and How) You Should Write Your WebAssembly in TypeScript — Performance is the main argument made by the author who shows off Wasmati, a library for creating WebAssembly modules by writing TypeScript using an API that corresponds to WASM operations. It works in modern browsers, Node, and Deno.

Gregor Mitscha-Baude

Backtick Strings are Likely the Wrong Tool for Your Job — It’s too common to try to put together query strings using JavaScript’s template strings, says Mattie, and this leads to potential injection problems. Luckily, there’s an alternative way..

Mattie Behrens

Dynaboard: AI Meets Low-Code to Get More Done, Faster — Build high performance authenticated web applications in a collaborative — full-stack — development environment.

Dynaboard sponsor

Is React Having an ‘Angular.js Moment’? — The author puts forward an argument comparing the discontinuity from AngularJS to Angular 2 in 2014 with current shifts in the React ecosystem.

François Zaninotto

Painless WebGPU Programming with taichi.js — taichi.js is a GPU computing framework that transforms JavaScript functions into parallelizable WebGPU compute shaders. You can see a live demo here using the Game of Life.

Dunfan Lu

A Preview of Web Apps on macOS Sonoma 14 Beta — The next version of macOS will double down on the idea of well integrated, desktop-installable webapps. Here’s a dig around into how it works so far.

Thomas Steiner

Live Streaming with Multiple Hosts in a Browser with Amazon IVS

Amazon Web Services (AWS) sponsor

The Many Ways to Select the n-th Character from a String

Christian Heilmann

Primitive Objects in JavaScript: When To Use Them

Kirill Myshkin

A Quick Primer on Node.js’s New Built-in Test Runner

endpts

🛠 Code & Tools

Algolia AutoComplete: A Fast, Full-Featured Autocomplete Library — This isn’t a UI widget – you’re in full control of rendering the experience – but this will let you wire up the experience you want users to have. There’s a getting started tutorial and a CodeSandbox demo where you can play around with some live code.

Algolia

Perfectionist 1.0: ESLint Plugin for Sorting Data — It supports sorting all sorts of things (props, imports, types..) and enforcing that with ESLint. It supports alphabetical and natural sorting, as well as by line length which leads to a neat aesthetic..

Azat S.

Comprehensive Full-Stack Application Monitoring Solution — A flexible application monitoring tool that doesn’t break the bank.

TelemetryHub sponsor

pgsql-ast-parser 11.1: A Simple SQL Parser — A TypeScript-based Postgres SQL syntax parser that can produce a typed AST for most queries (PL/pgSQL is not supported). It’s used as part of the author’s pg-mem project which provides a mini, ‘in memory’ Postgres clone in Node or the browser (here’s a live demo of that).

Olivier Guimbal

Goxygen 0.4: Quickly Generate a Go(lang) Backend for a JS Project — A tool that sets up a new Go-based project with Angular, React, or Vue in the front-end, and Docker and Docker Compose files to spin it up. It’s been around a few years, but has now added Vue 3.3 support and a Vite-based Vue template.

Sasha Shpota

Noble Curves 1.1
↳ Audited elliptic curve cryptography library.

Taxi 1.3
↳ Add slick PJAX navigation to a site.

Inngest 2.0
↳ Build serverless job systems with TypeScript.

TinyBase 3.2
↳ Reactive data store for local‑first apps.

React Arborist 3.1
↳ Complete tree view component (demo).

Alova 2.6
↳ Request strategy library for Vue, React and Svelte.

💻 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.

🛠 Useful Thing of the Week

bundlejs: Online npm Package Bundle Size Checker — A browser-based tool that can treeshake, bundle, minify, and compress (gzip and brotli) packages to show you what their weight impact is. It runs entirely in the browser, too, using the WebAssembly build of esbuild.

Okiki Ojo

Why Svelte is converting TypeScript to JSDoc

Posted on by

#​638 — May 11, 2023

Read on the Web

JavaScript Weekly

The JavaScript Ecosystem is Delightfully Weird — There are plenty of examples of how JavaScript is weird but Sam focuses on the why. If you’ve been a JS developer for many years you’ll have seen it go through many phases and morph to fit its environment. Sam paints the big picture, concluding with a talk Dan Abramov gave yesterday called “React from Another Dimension.”

Sam Ruby

The New JS Features Coming in ECMAScript 2023 — The next JavaScript update brings smaller additions familiar from other languages, but there are more significant developments waiting in the wings. 

Mary Branscombe (The New Stack)

Full Stack for Front-End Engineers with Jem Young (Netflix) — Learn what it means to become a well-rounded full-stack engineer with this hands-on video course. You’ll dive into servers, work with the command line, understand networking and security, set up continuous integration and deployment, manage databases, build containers, and more.

Frontend Masters sponsor

Vue 3.3 ‘Rurouni Kenshin’ Released — Named after a popular manga series, the latest release of Vue is focused on developer experience improvements, particular for those using TypeScript.

Evan You

John Komarnicki says ▶️ Vue 3.3’s defineModel macro will change the way you write your components.

Next.js 13.4 Released — Despite the minor version bump, this is a big release for the popular React framework. The new app router and its improved approach to filesystem based routing is now offered as a stable feature, with a new concept of server actions being introduced in alpha as a way to mutate data on the server without needing to create an in-between API layer.

Tim Neutkens and Sebastian Markbåge

⚡️ IN BRIEF:

???? Svelte is converting from TypeScript to JSDoc (example).. sort of. Rich Harris popped up on Hacker News to provide some all important context but the ultimate result will be smaller package sizes and a better experience for Svelte’s maintainers.

React now has official ‘canary’ releases if you want to use newer features than in the stable releases but still be on an officially supported channel.

Newly released Firefox 113 lets you override JS files in its debugger.

No stranger to controversy, Ruby on Rails’s David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH) tweeted: ???? “TypeScript sucked out much of the joy I had writing JavaScript.”

RELEASES:

Glint 1.0 – TypeScript powered tooling for Glimmer / Ember templates.

Elementary 2.0 – JS/C++ library for building audio apps.

???? Articles & Tutorials

ES2023’s New Array Copying Methods — The newest ECMAScript spec introduces some new methods on Array that you’ll eventually find useful in your own programs. Phil gives us the tour.

Phil Nash

Private Class Fields Considered Harmful — “As a library author, I’ve decided to avoid private class fields from now on and gradually refactor them out of my existing libraries.” Why? Well, that’s the interesting part..

Lea Verou

▶  I’m Done with React — Going from least-to-most important, the reasons this developer isn’t choosing React for future projects make for interesting watching, particularly if you too are overwhelmed by upheaval in the React world. Solid is one of the alternatives he has warmed to.

Adam Elmore

Constraining Language Runtimes with Deterministic Execution — Explore various challenges encountered while using different language runtimes to execute workflow code deterministically.

Temporal Technologies sponsor

Running JavaScript in Rust with Deno — Deno’s use of Rust makes it a natural choice if you’re building a Rust app and want to integrate a JavaScript engine.

Austin Poor

Regular Expressions in JavaScript — Powerful but often misunderstood, many will benefit from this roundup of the potential regexes offer to JavaScript developers.

Adebayo Adams

How to Measure Page Loading Time with the Performance API — The Performance API is a group of standards used to measure the performance of webapps supported in most modern browsers.

Silvestar Bistrović

How to Build a JS VST or Audio Unit Plugin on macOS — VSTs and Audio Units are both types of audio plugins for audio editing software and they’re usually built in C or C++. This tutorial doesn’t dig into the audio side of things, but more the practicalities of packaging things up to get started.

Chris Mendez

An Introduction to the Bun Runtime — If you’ve not yet played with the newest entrant into the JS runtime space, this is a high level overview.

Craig Buckler

2023 State of the Java Ecosystem

New Relic sponsor

Configuring ESLint, Prettier, and TypeScript Together

Josh Goldberg

DestroyRef: Your New Angular 16 Friend

Ion Prodan

Why Astro is My Favorite Framework

Ryan Trimble

???? Code & Tools

file-type 18.4: Detect the File Type of a Buffer, Uint8Array or ArrayBuffer — For example, give it the raw data from a PNG file, and it’ll tell you it’s a PNG file. Uses magic numbers so is targeted solely at non text-based formats.

Sindre Sorhus

Learn How the Rising Trend of Malicious Packages Can Affect Your Apps — Keep your applications secure with Snyk’s article on the increasing number of malicious OS packages and ways to mitigate these risks.

Snyk sponsor

Livefir: Build Reactive HTML Apps with Go and Alpine.js — Go isn’t a language that often pops up in the context of the frontend, but this is a neat integration between Go on the backend and Alpine.js up front.

Adnaan Badr

JZZ.js: A Developer Friendly MIDI library — For both browsers and Node, JZZ.js provides an abstraction over working with MIDI related concepts. There are many examples, but the easter egg in the top left is our favorite.

Sema / Jazz-Soft

htmlparser2 9.0: A ‘Fast and Forgiving’ HTML and XML Parser — Consumes documents and calls callbacks, but it can generate a DOM as well. Works in both Node and browser.

Felix Böhm

cRonstrue: Library to Convert cron Expressions into Human-Readable Form — Given something like */5 * * * *, it’ll return “Every 5 minutes”. No dependencies.

Brady Holt

Knip: Find Unused Files, Dependencies and Exports in TypeScript Projects — Being Dutch for “snip” is appropriate as Knip can trim away things that aren’t being used in your project.

Lars Kappert

jsPlumb 6.1
↳ Visual connectivity for webapps.

gridstack.js 8.1
↳ Build interactive dashboards quickly.

???? 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

Team Lead Web Development — Experienced with Node, React, and TS? Join us and lead a motivated team of devs and help grow and shape the future of our web app focused on helping millions explore the outdoors.

Komoot

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

???? Don’t tell Satya Nadella..

Fake Windows 11 in Svelte — This is a cute little side project, and the code is available too. The most common complaint I’ve seen is that it’s actually more responsive than the real Windows.. ???? Be sure to check out both ‘VS Code’ and ‘Microsoft Edge’ in this environment.

Yashash Pugalia

???? Prefer Windows XP? Maybe RebornXP is more for you. Complete with the classic starting up sound!