Tag: website

JavaScript sans build systems?

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#​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

Why document.write() is bad

Posted on by

#​622 — January 20, 2023

Read on the Web

JavaScript Weekly

Why Not document.write()? — Many moons ago, document.write was a mainstay of client-side JavaScript code, but it’s long been considered a bad practice – why? Harry digs in, noting that it “guarantees both a blocking fetch and a blocking execution, which holds up the parser for far longer than necessary”.

Harry Roberts

New: The WebAssembly JavaScript Promise Integration API — A technical explanation from the V8 team on a new API to let WebAssembly apps bridge the synchronous / asynchronous gap of expectations around external functionality (consider that many apps are written synchronously, but modern Web APIs are usually asynchronous). JSPI helps bridge both worlds and can be tested via a flag in Chrome.

McCabe, Michaud, Rezvov, Dahl / V8 Team

Break the Programming Mold with Dependency Injection — Keep your code on the cutting edge with dependency injection in JavaScript. Check out Snyk’s guide that gives a breakdown of what dependency injection is, when you should use it, and what popular JavaScript frameworks it’s implemented.

Snyk sponsor

Why Is My Jest Suite So Slow? — Jest is known for its speed and simplicity so the author was surprised at how quickly his team’s test suite was slowing down. This is a write up of the ensuing investigation along with the improvements that slashed test running time.

Steven Lemon

Bun v0.5 Released — Bun is another JavaScript runtime taking the world by storm and a level of Node compatibility has been baked in from the start. v0.5 adds support for node:readline, workspaces, a node:dns shim, and network socket creation support such that more Node.js-based database libraries work out of the box.

Ashcon Partovi

IN BRIEF:

The ▶️ latest episode of the JS Party podcast tackles ‘the rise and fall’ of JavaScript frameworks and the modern trend towards smaller ones.

The folks at NodeSource have put together a top 10 list of Node open-source projects ‘to keep an eye on’ in 2023.

Aurelia 2 is now in beta.

RELEASES:

⭐️ esbuild 0.17.0
↳ Popular bundler. Note that this is a key release with backwards incompatible changes.

Inertia.js 1.0
↳ Build SPAs for any backend.

React Native 0.71

Remix 1.10.0
↳ Popular full stack framework.

📒 Articles & Tutorials

🎨  Building an Accessible Theme Picker — An attractively presented, easy to follow tutorial for a handy site feature.

Sarah L. Fossheim

Fixing a Memory Leak in a Production Node.js App — Kent encountered a variety of weird memory and CPU usage spikes in his Node-powered app and decided to figure out what was going on. This post walks through his complete journey, with plenty of side problems encountered along the way, before discovering the root cause was where he least expected it.

Kent C Dodds

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

Stream sponsor

📊  A Beginner’s Guide to Chrome Tracing — For when you want to go deeper than the Performance tab. With tracing, you can record what a browser is up to far behind the scenes.

Nolan Lawson

Handling Errors Like a Pro in TypeScript — “Learn the design pattern I use to handle errors and write cleaner code.”

Kolby Sisk

A Beginner’s Guide to async/await with Examples

James Hibbard

10 Mistakes to Avoid When Starting with Vue 3

Fotis Adamakis

🛠 Code & Tools

RoughNotation: Cute Animated ‘Rough’ Text Annotations — Uses Rough.js (itself a project worth checking out) to get a hand-drawn look. Lots of nice interactive examples on the page showing a variety of annotation styles (boxes, underlines, circles..)

Preet Shihn

Free Website Speed Test: Does Your Site Meet Google’s Core Web Vitals? — Get an in-depth technical analysis of your site and learn how to make it fast. Rank higher in Google & deliver great UX.

DebugBear sponsor

Modern Errors: Handle Errors in a Simple, Stable, Consistent Way — Create error classes, wrap or aggregate errors, or use one of several plugins to do things like print bug reporting info, print stack traces, or more. Happy in both Node and the browser.

ehmicky

Shifty: A Small, Fast Tweening Engine — All it does is tweening. It’s a low level animation solution that you can integrate into any rendering mechanism of your choice. The examples here demonstrate it well as it can be used for ‘animating’ things in an unconventional sense. GitHub repo.

Jeremy Kahn

Barba.js: For Smooth Visual Transitions Between Pages — You certainly can’t say the project’s homepage doesn’t show off all of its features! For such a dramatic set of effects, things feel smooth and.. surprisingly tolerable 😁 GitHub repo.

De Rosa, Michel, et al.

Rete.js 1.5: A Framework for Visual Programming — Create a node-based editor in the browser and apply logic. Check out these demos on CodePen. GitHub repo.

Vitaliy Stoliarov

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

Shortcut (formerly Clubhouse.io) sponsor

gpu-io: GPU-Accelerated Computing Library — for physics simulations and other mathematical calculations. A neat look at the power of WebGL. Several examples.

Amanda Ghassaei

Chart.js 4.2
↳ Simple Canvas-based charts. (Samples.)

Serialize JavaScript 6.0.1
↳ Serialize JS to a JSON superset.

axios-retry 3.4
↳ Axios plugin that retries failed requests.

Axios 1.2.3 – Popular HTTP client library.

Commander.js 10.0 – Node.js CLIs made easy.

Mineflayer 4.7 – JS API for Minecraft bots.

Wretch 2.4 – Fetch API wrapper with niceties.

💻 Jobs

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

CKEditor

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

Hired

Java-Script Jarre

Posted on by Simon Helberg

#​621 — January 13, 2023

Read on the Web

JavaScript Weekly

The State of JS 2022 — The State of JS is one of the JavaScript ecosystem’s most popular surveys and this time 39,471 folks took part giving us a snapshot of the tools, technologies, and language features people are using (or not using!) There’s a lot to go through, but here are some key points:

top-level await is the most newly adopted feature recently.
The JavaScript / TypeScript balance shows a majority of developers using TypeScript over JS.
Express remains by far the most popular backend framework with Nest, Fastify, Strapi, and Koa following somewhat behind.
Other interesting results can be found in JS pain points, what is currently missing from JS, and the ‘Awards’ for stand out items (complete with snazzy visual effects).

Devographics

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

🧈 ButterCMS sponsor

🗣 Is TypeScript Worth It? — Time saver or waste of time? The relationship between TypeScript and JavaScript remains a complex one. An extensive discussion took place on Hacker News this week and, notably, TypeScript PM Daniel Rosenwasser popped up to respond to some of the concerns.

Hacker News

IN BRIEF:

You’ll be aware of JavaScript’s strict mode but one developer thinks we need a stricter mode to fix several other syntax issues.

Publint is an online tool for ‘linting’ live npm packages to see if they are packaged correctly, as a way to ensure maximum compatibility across environments.

RELEASES:

Node v19.4.0 and v18.13.0 (LTS)

Commander.js 9.5
↳ Node.js command-line interface toolkit.

Angular 15.1

Pixi.js 7.1 – Fast 2D on WebGL engine.

📒 Articles & Tutorials

The Gotcha of Unhandled Promise Rejections — A rough edge with promises that can sneak up on you. Jake looks at a ‘gotcha’ around unhandled promise rejections and how to work around it.

Jake Archibald

HTML with Superpowers: The Guidebook — A free resource introducing Web Components, what they are, and what problems they’re trying to solve. You can see the Guidebook directly here.

Dave Rupert

With Retool You Ship Apps Fast with 100+ Perfectly Crafted UI Components — The fast way for devs to build and share internal tools. Teams at companies like Amazon, DoorDash & NBC collaborate around custom-built Retool apps to solve internal workflows.

Retool sponsor

Everything About React’s ‘Concurrent Mode’ Features — An in-depth, example-led exploration of Concurrent Mode (now more a set of features integrated into React 18 than a distinct ‘mode’).

Henrique Yuji

Using GitHub Copilot for Unit Testing? — Even if you find the idea of a AI tool like Copilot writing production code distasteful, it may have a place in speeding up writing tests.

Ianis Triandafilov

How to Destructure Props in Vue (Composition API) — How to correctly destructure props object in a Vue component while maintaining the reactivity.

Dmitri Pavlutin

Using Inline JavaScript Modules to Prevent CSS Blockage

Stoyan Stefanov

How to Build a GraphQL Server with Deno

Andy Jiang

🛠 Code & Tools

Gluon: Framework for Creating Desktop Apps from Sites — A new approach for building desktop apps on Windows and Linux from Web sites using Node (or Deno) and already installed browsers (Chromium or Firefox). Initial macOS support has just been added too.

Gluon

Structura.js: Lightweight Library for Immutable State Management — ” It is based on the idea of structural sharing. The library is very similar to Immer.js, but it has some advantages over it.”

Giuseppe Raso

Tuple, a Lightning-Fast Pairing Tool Built for Remote Developers — High-resolution, crystal-clear screen sharing, low-latency remote control, and less CPU usage than you’d think possible.

Tuple sponsor

Bay.js: A Lightweight Library for Web Components — Makes it easy to create web components that can be reused across projects. It also boasts performant state changes and secure event binding.

Ian Dunkerley

Twify: Scaffold a Tailwind CSS Project with a Single Command — You can use your preferred package manager and it supports creating projects with Next.js, Nuxt 2/3, SvelteKit, Remix, Angular, and more.

Kazi Ahmed

Lazy Brush 2.0: A Library for Smooth Pointer Drawing — Allow your users to draw smooth curves and straight lines with your mouse, finger or any pointing device. This long standing library has just migrated to TypeScript and gained a new ‘friction’ option to customize the feel. GitHub repo.

Jan Hug

➗ Mafs: React Components for Interactive Math — Build interactive, animated visualizations using declarative code with illustrative demos like bezier curves. The documentation is fantastic – check out how easy it is to make plots. Or just head to the GitHub repo.

Steven Petryk

Are You Looking for a New Observability Tool?

TelemetryHub by Scout sponsor

Hyphenopoly 5.0: A Polyfill for Client-Side Hyphenation — An interesting use of WebAssembly here.

Mathias Nater

visx 3.0
↳ D3-powered visualization React components.

Atrament 3.0
↳ Library for drawing and handwriting on a canvas element.

HLS.js 1.3
↳ Library to play HLS (HTTP Live Streaming) in browsers, with MSE support.

💻 Jobs

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

CKEditor

Backend Engineer, TypeScript (Berlin / Remote) — Thousands of people love our product (see Trustpilot for yourself). Join the team behind it and help us scale. 🚀

Feather

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

Hired

🎶 Écoute la musique..

Oxygene Pt 4, as Performed by JavaScript — This is fun. Dittytoy is a simple, JavaScript-powered online generative music tool and someone has put together a surprisingly faithful rendition of perhaps one of the best known instrumental synth songs ever, all the way from 1976.

Dittytoy

Vite 4.0 released

Posted on by Simon Helberg

#​618 — December 9, 2022

Read on the Web

JavaScript Weekly

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

Evan You and Vite Contributors

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

Frontend Masters sponsor

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

Monish Mohan (GitHub)

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

Wallaby.js Team

IN BRIEF:

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

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

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

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

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

RELEASES:

Rome 11 – Linter in urbe novissima sunt.

Storybook 7.0 beta 0

Rollup 3.7 – ES module bundler.

xv 2.0 – Zero-config Node test runner.

Nx 15.3 (A huge news update post.)

Ember 4.9

Bun 0.3 – The challenger JS runtime.

📒 Articles & Tutorials

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

Weston Ruter

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

Stream sponsor

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

Yoni Goldberg

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

Loren Sands-Ramshaw

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

Wallaby.js sponsor

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

Ben Popper podcast

🛠 Code & Tools

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

Nadav Abrahami (Wix)

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

Andrew Courtice

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

Appwrite sponsor

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

Oleksii Trekhleb

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

Daniel Moore

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

Alexander Shabunevich

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

Menyhért Hegedűs

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

Ori Granot

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

💻 Jobs

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

Stimulus

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

Vertex Inc

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

Hired

Spacetime 7.3
↳ Lightweight JavaScript timezone library.

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

Splitter 1.4
↳ React component for split views.

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

Mongoose 6.8
↳ MongoDB object modeling library.

React Tooltip 5.0