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Industry News

11/13/2024
Will we care about frameworks in an AI world?





















#​713 — November 14, 2024

Read on the Web




JavaScript Weekly








Component Party: A Rosetta Stone of UI Libraries — A long-standing comparison of many different frameworks (like React, Vue, Svelte, Angular, Qwik, Solid.js, etc.) by way of simple code snippets to perform various tasks. Now including Svelte 5 and Angular 17/Renaissance.


Mathieu Schimmerling






Will We Care About Frameworks in the Future? — Paul wonders if the increasing use of LLMs and agents in software development will lead to a reduction in the need for new frameworks and extra developer-focused abstractions.


Paul Kinlan






Advanced JavaScript Tools to Empower Your Applications — Build better web applications with powerful JavaScript developer tools including: SpreadJS Excel-like spreadsheet components, ActiveReportsJS reporting tools, Wijmo UI component suite, and Document Solutions viewers for PDF, Excel, Image, and more.


MESCIUS inc sponsor






The vlt Package Manager and Serverless Registry — A very experienced team, including npm creator Isaac Schlueter, launched Vlt to ‘build the future’ of JavaScript package management. The first results have appeared in the shape of the vlt client (which can replace npm), as well as a serverless package registry you can self host to serve up your own packages.


Clarke, Adorno, Schlueter, and Karrys




💡 Sarah Gooding shares some more background on Vlt's story here.





TypeScript 5.7 Release Candidate — The popular typed JS superset adds support for ES2024 as a target, can report errors when variables aren't initialized, adds path rewriting for relative paths, and can use Node’s compile caching to save on parsing work. The final release is expected in a week or two.


Microsoft




IN BRIEF:





RELEASES:




📒 Articles & Tutorials








JavaScript Import Attributes (ES2025) Explained — Import Attributes (now at stage 4 at TC39 and already supported in some runtimes) add a way to supply useful metadata about modules you’re importing.


Trevor I. Lasn




💡 Trevor is on quite a run of great posts. He also digs into Promise.try and how JavaScript's bitwise shifting operators work.





Creating an ASCII Shader Using OGL — An incredibly cool effect demonstrated in a great tutorial on getting started with shaders and using OGL, a lightweight WebGL library.


Andrico Karoulla






Guide to Error & Exception Handling in React — Learn common errors and best practices for recovering from them in a user-friendly way.


Sentry sponsor






How a BBC Navigation Bar Component Broke Depending on Which External Monitor It Was On — A look at an interesting bug related to external monitor positioning. The lesson is that “browsers have an interoperability issue in how they represent screen coordinates in multi-monitor setups”.


Josh Tumath






How to Set Up Next.js 15 for Production in 2024 — Share in this author’s experience in scaling up Next.js apps to over 100k monthly active users and millions of monthly visitors.


Jan Hesters (ReactSquad)






▶  From Next.js to htmx: A Real World Example — An interesting case study explained in a 50-minute screencast: “Replacing my components with the equivalent HTML elements powered by htmx wasn’t exactly an easy task, but one that was worth the time.”


Pouria Ezzati




📄 How to Optimize Performance in Vue Apps Jakub Andrzejewski


📄 How to Build a Database App with Drizzle ORM and Deno Andy Jiang


📄 Essential tsconfig.json Options You Should Use Duy NG


📺 Building a Rich Text Editor with Svelte 5 Michael Aufreiter



🛠 Code & Tools








Lexical 0.20: An Easy-to-Extend Text Editor Framework from Meta — A text editor framework built by Meta with extensibility, accessibility, and cross platform support in mind (there’s even a Swift variant for iOS). There’s a live playground if you want to give it a try. React support is first class, but it can be adapted to work elsewhere (as with svelte-lexical).


Meta / Facebook






Introducing @clerk/nextjs v6, with Support for Next.js 15 — With v6, auth() helper is async, <ClerkProvider> defaults to static rendering, and partial pre-rendering is supported.


Clerk sponsor






Storybook 8.4 Released — A minor release for the powerful frontend component workshop but “one of our most feature-packed minor releases” with one click component testing, Svelte 5 support, and React Native Storybook 8.


Michael Shilman






🗓️ Schedule-X 2.5: Material Design Calendar and Date Picker — Available in the form of React/Preact, Vue, Svelte, Angular, or plain JS components. Open source but with a premium version with extra features. GitHub repo.


Tom Österlund






🎵 music-metadata: Stream and File-Based Music Metadata Parser — Supporting formats like MP3, FLAC, Ogg, WAV, WMA, AAC and AIFF, this library extracts metadata like ID3v1 and iTunes tags for processing however you want. Yes, it even works in the browser.


Borewit






Looking for a DIY Survey Solution? SurveyJS Has You Covered — Build, customize, and store surveys with ease. Total data control, JSON-driven, no backend restrictions—integrates into any JavaScript app.


SurveyJS sponsor






Micromark 4.0.1: A Small Compliant Markdown Parser — 100% compliance with the CommonMark standard, supports extensions (such as for GitHub Flavored Markdown), and full test coverage.


Titus Wormer






jsep 1.4: JavaScript Expression Parser — “Think of jsep as a tool to parse the kinds of expressions that would be written in individual Excel cells.”


Stephen Oney











📰 Classifieds




🎹 STRICH: Add blazing fast and reliable 1D/2D Barcode Scanning to your web apps. Free demo app and 30-day trial available.



Never miss a Shopify, Stripe, GitHub, Paddle… or any webhook again with Hookdeck's serverless queue infrastructure. Learn more.



Meticulous automatically creates & maintains E2E UI tests. Zero flakes. Used by Lattice, Bilt Rewards and others.






😀 More fun at Val Town






I've written about Val Town several times and am a huge fan. It's a site where you can write and deploy TypeScript from your browser and describes itself as "if GitHub Gists could run, and AWS Lambda was fun."


It's been a delight to watch its progression from a prototype to what is now a solid platform used in production use cases and I want to call out some recent posts that keep it on my radar:


Building a Code-Writing Robot and Keeping it Happy – Townie is an AI assistant for building apps on Val Town. This post digs into how it works, some of the problems encountered in its creation, and how its results are evaluated.


Val Town Town – Could you implement something like Val Town on Val Town itself? At the risk of eating its own tail, it turns out you can.


If you're stuck for something to do or check out, check out Val Town – it's fun!










11/06/2024
JSConf is back





















#​712 — November 7, 2024

Read on the Web




JavaScript Weekly








JavaScript's ??= Operator: Default Values Made Simple — The ??= nullish coalescing assignment operator snuck into JavaScript a few years ago via ECMAScript 2021 and has been broadly supported almost everywhere for ages. Trevor shows off how it can tighten up your assignments here.


Trevor I. Lasn




💡 He also took a similar look at the pipeline operator |>, but this feature is still only in draft as a proposal.





🇺🇸 JSConf is Back; Here's the Details — Two months ago, the OpenJS Foundation announced that the popular JSConf brand was joining the foundation and a new North American JSConf event would happen in due course. Now you can mark your calendars for October 14-16, 2025 for an event taking place in the Chesapeake Bay area of Maryland, USA.


OpenJS Foundation






Handsontable: A Powerful Data Grid for Internal Apps — Speed up the development of your React app with a feature-rich data grid - sorting, filtering, multiple cell types, built-in formulas, CRUD operations, and an extensive API. Come visit our booth at React Summit US on Nov 19th to see it in action!


Handsontable sponsor






Announcing Rspack 1.1 — Rspack is a fast, Rust-powered alternative to Webpack but with the same API. v1.1 boasts being 10% faster than v1.0 and has an improved, though still experimental, incremental build feature. If super fast build times are your bag, this needs to be on your radar.


The Rspack Team




IN BRIEF:





RELEASES:




📒 Articles & Tutorials





Wasmer Adds Node.js and Bun Support — Wasmer is a Rust-powered WebAssembly runtime and Wasmer 5.0 adds V8 and JavaScriptCore backend support, meaning you can try all sorts of things like, say, running Clang, Python, or even compiled JavaScript apps inside your own JavaScript app..


Syrus Akbary






Why Would Anyone Need Generator Functions? — A golden oldie that I enjoyed revisiting because it covers an oft misunderstood and not particularly commonly encountered JavaScript feature.


James Sinclair






Breakpoints and console.log Is the Past, Time Travel Is the Future — Next-level testing in any editor, 15x faster with Interactive Time Travel Debugger, real-time insights & advanced coverage in a new UI.


Wallaby Team sponsor






The Most Effective Ways to Improve Core Web Vitals — Everyone wants their site to be as performant as possible, especially when Google factors performance into its rankings, but how? Google shares a variety of practical techniques to improve your INP, LCP, and CLS metrics here.


Google






Why Code Security Matters - Even in Hardened Environments — A well diagrammed dive into a technique that allows malicious parties to turn a file write vulnerability in a Node.js app into a remote code execution exploit even when the file system is read-only.


Stefan Schiller (Sonar)






Generating Random Mazes with JavaScript — A fun, well-presented walkthrough of a basic maze generation process.


Paul Hebert




Along similarly fun lines is Chris MMO's Generating Lever-Door Puzzles.





MongoDB Helps Devs Build Better AI Agents with LangChain & Hybrid Search — It’s easier than ever to build AI agents with LangChain, perform hybrid search and ingest large-scale documents.


MongoDB sponsor




🚗 Hacking Cars in JavaScript – Or “Running Replay Attacks in the Browser with the HackRF.” Charlie Gerard


📄 How Bun Supports V8 APIs Without Using V8 (Part 2) Ben Grant (Bun)


📄 How to Create an Organic Text Distortion Effect with Infinite Scrolling – There's a live demo of the striking, though disorienting, effect. Jorge Toloza


📄 Vercel Makes Changes to Next.js to Simplify Self-Hosting Loraine Lawson (The New Stack)


📄 The Latest in Angular Change Detection – All You Need to Know Krzysztof Skorupka



🛠 Code & Tools









npmpackage.info: Detailed Package Info on a Single Page — Give this online tool the name of an npm package and you get a quick ‘dashboard’ style view of the project’s main statistics, covering areas like quality scores, commits, open issues, releases, bundle size, and more.


Shrinath Nayak




📊 NPM Chart is another cool new site focused on showing npm package download stats.





Prompt, Run, Edit, and Deploy Full-Stack Web Apps with bolt.new — StackBlitz recently released an in-browser AI web development agent: bolt.new! Give it a try today.


StackBlitz sponsor






Docusaurus 3.6: The Docs-Oriented Static Site Generator — Meta’s Docusaurus is a popular way to build docs sites (like these). v3.6 is focused on performance, now using tools like Rspack and SWC to make builds super fast.


Meta






Immutable.js 5.0: Immutable Collections for JavaScript — Provides numerous persistent immutable data structures including a list, stack, map, ordered map, set, ordered set, and records.


Lee Byron and Contributors






Sonner 1.7: The Toast Notification React Component — There’s a live demo to try on the homepage, or see the GitHub repo. v1.7 focuses on animation improvements, browser support, and React 19.


Emil Kowalski






Quaternion.js: A JavaScript Quaternion library — Last week we featured the author’s Fraction.js library, now we go a step deeper with a way to work with 3D rotations using quarternions.


Robert Eisele






  • BlockNote 0.19 – 'Notion-style' block-based editor. Now supporting column-based layouts and client-side export to .docx and PDF. There's a demo on the project's homepage.




  • 🔐 OpenPGP.js 6.0 – OpenPGP implementation for JavaScript now supporting the new version of the OpenPGP spec, RFC 9580.




  • Fastify 5.1 – The fast, low overhead Node.js web framework.




  • xr 6.4 – Bring VR/AR to React Three Fiber apps.










📰 Classifieds




⚙️ Create entire web apps with Reactile and let it handle your widgets and windows within a single browser tab. 1-month free trial. Try it now.



Meticulous automatically creates & maintains E2E UI tests. Zero flakes. Used by Lattice, Bilt Rewards and others.



Pythagora is an AI dev tool that builds production-ready tools (not demo apps). It writes the code and talks to you in the process.





📗 We're also reading..



We've also had some tabs open that aren't JavaScript specific but you might find interesting nonetheless:


🫣 Weird Lexical Syntax by Justine Tunney. Justine is building a syntax highlighter and set out to learn 42 programming languages in a single month to help figure out the edge cases. She recounts the surprising things she discovered about the syntax of various languages, including JavaScript.


👻 Before You Buy a Domain, Check if it's Haunted by Bryan Braun. Buying a domain for a side project is always fun, but it's far less fun when the domain was previously used for nefarious purposes and comes with baggage..


🤔 What Has Case Distinction But is Neither Uppercase or Lowercase? by Raymond Chen. It sounds like a riddle, but there are actually Unicode characters that have case distinction yet are neither uppercase nor lowercase themselves.










10/30/2024
Cutting JavaScript into two: trick or treat?





















#​711 — October 31, 2024

Read on the Web




JavaScript Weekly








Python Jumps to #1 on GitHub Over JavaScript, But... — GitHub Universe took place this week, flooding us with data about how folks are using the platform. Of interest to those on social media was that Python has taken JavaScript's #1 language crown, though many argued that TypeScript (now #3) made an impact here. In positive news, JS still ranks first for code pushes alone and there's been a 15% jump in npm package consumption in the past year.


GitHub




🎉 In other GitHub news, their Copilot AI coding tool can now use alternative LLMs like Gemini and Claude, and GitHub Spark is a new AI-powered tool for rapidly creating and deploying small apps.





Implementing Clean Architecture in Next.js — Learn how to make projects testable and debuggable, independent of UI, framework, database, and external dependencies with the concept of Clean Architecture. Join us live on November 4th.


Sentry sponsor






Should JavaScript Be Split Into Two Languages? — Two weeks ago we linked to an interesting slidedeck presented at TC39 where it was proposed to split JavaScript into two languages: a basic core and a fully featured version that needs tooling to compile it down. This covers a bit more of the story and led to a particularly extensive Hacker News discussion too.


Dev Class




🤔 You could argue TypeScript is already that second language..?



IN BRIEF:





RELEASES:




📒 Articles & Tutorials





How We Shrunk Our JavaScript Monorepo Git Size by 94% — And by “we”, the author means Microsoft, which had an extremely large 178 gigabyte JavaScript monorepo on its hands – big enough that many employees had problems cloning it at all. Jonathan tells the full story here.


Jonathan Creamer






How to Roll Your Own Auth in JavaScript and TypeScript — A snappy look at how to build a session-based authentication system, something Robin notes “does not have to be complicated”.


Robin Wieruch






MongoDB Atlas Search Integration with BuildShip — MongoDB Atlas Search offers powerful full-text search, vector search, and hybrid search capabilities.


MongoDB sponsor






Using shadcn/ui with React 19 (and Next.js 15) — Fresh documentation from the shadcn/ui project on the specifics of using the popular component library with React 19 generally, though with a slight emphasis on Next.js 15.


shadcn






Reimplementing JavaScript's == in JavaScript — What a trip. Whether or not you’re aware of the ‘quirks’ of JavaScript’s == operator, this could boggle your mind.


Evan Hahn






HTML Form Validation is Heavily Underused — An exploration of the “powerful validation mechanisms” of HTML forms, opining that they’re underused, and proposing why that lack of utilization may be.


everdimension




📄 Node.js, Pipes, and Disappearing Bytes – If piping a Node app’s output to another command, mysterious problems can arise.. Sam Lijin


📄 Introducing the New Svelte CLI Tool: sv Ben McCann



🛠 Code & Tools








Faker 9.1: Generate Fake, Realistic Data on Demand — Names, bios, addresses, zip codes, dates, monetary amounts, transactions, and a lot more besides. I really like the guided DevTools console based demo you can try – an idea other projects should consider. GitHub repo.


Faker.js Team






Fraction.js: Library for Working with Rational Numbers — The imprecise representation of floating point numbers can lead to all sorts of problems, so if you’re working with fractions at all, you might want a little more precision, which Fraction.js offers.


Robert Eisele






Handsontable: Spreadsheet-Like JavaScript Data Grid for Your App — Feature-rich data grid for developers seeking a powerful, customizable, and accessible solution to manage complex data.


Handsontable sponsor






Fedify: A Framework for Building ActivityPub Servers — If you want to join the fediverse with an app of your own (rather than leaning on Mastodon, say), this gives you the building blocks you need.


Hong Minhee






Yantra: A JavaScript Engine for .NET Standard — A managed JS engine for .NET Standard written in C# that supports both CommonJS and ES modules.


Yantra Team






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


Various Authors






Dependency Cruiser 16.5: A Way to Visualize 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






AuthKit: The World’s Best Login Box — Powered by WorkOS & Radix — AuthKit is a complete solution for authentication, authorization, and user management. It’s free up to 1 million MAUs and comes standard with RBAC, bot protection, MFA, and more.


AuthKit sponsor






🔊 WebAssembly Audio Decoders — Targeting both browser and Node.js use cases, this is a collection of WASM-powered audio decoding libraries for formats like MPEG I/II/III, FLAC, Ogg Opus, Ogg FLAC, Opus, and Ogg Vorbis.


Ethan Halsall






  • 📺 YouTube.js 11.0 – Unofficial JS client for YouTube's private API.




  • Serverless Express 4.16 – Run Express.js on AWS Lambda, API Gateway, Lambda@Edge, etc. Now supporting Express 5 too.




  • Execa 9.5 – Powerful process execution library for Node. When redirecting stdout or stderr to a file, you can now optionally append rather than replace.




  • MUI X 7.22 – Popular React component suite. Now with server-side support for Data Grid row grouping.




  • 🗓️ react-calendar 5.1 – The 'ultimate' calendar for your React app.




  • 📷 VisionCamera 4.6 – Advanced camera control for React Native.




  • Elliptic 6.6 – Plain JS elliptic curve cryptography implementation.




  • Acorn 8.14 – Small, fast, JavaScript-based JavaScript parser.




  • Strapi 5.2 – Popular Node.js headless CMS.










📰 Classifieds




🏠 Remote Senior Developer Experience Engineer - Passionate about React & GraphQL? Join us as a Developer Experience Engineer to elevate our dev community. Remote, EU timezone.



How Google handles authorization at scale. A technical comparison of Google's Relationship-based authz system and Oso's Authz as a Service.












10/23/2024
A huge week for both Svelte and Next.js





















#​710 — October 24, 2024

Read on the Web




JavaScript Weekly








Svelte 5 is Alive — The long awaited next major release of Svelte, the compiler-driven JS UI framework, is the “most significant release in the project’s history”, while remaining largely backwards compatible. A big addition is runes for explicitly declaring reactive state, but there’s much more besides. The official svelte.dev site has also undergone a big rebuild to act as an ‘omnisite’ for all things Svelte.


The Svelte Team




📺 If you want to see how to use Svelte 5, Syntax's Scott Tolinski has released ▶️ a 2 hour Svelte 5 basics course on YouTube.





FlexGrid by Wijmo: The Industry-Leading JavaScript Datagrid — A fast and flexible DataGrid for building modern web apps. Key features and virtualized rendering are included in the grid module. Pick and choose special features to keep your app small. Built for JavaScript, extended to Angular, React, and Vue.


Wijmo From MESCIUS inc sponsor






GenAIScript: Microsoft's Generative AI Scripting Environment — Microsoft is really poking at AI from all angles. TypeChat introduced a type-safe way to talk to LLMs; now GenAIScript offers a JavaScript-powered way to programmatically assemble prompts and process responses. They claim it “brings essential LLM prompt tooling into a cohesive scripting environment.”


Microsoft






Next.js 15 Released — It’s a big week for the popular (some may even argue default) React framework with Next.js Conf starting today, as well as this release. It includes a codemod CLI for easier upgrading, async request APIs, alignment with React 19, and more.


Vercel




IN BRIEF:





RELEASES:




📒 Articles & Tutorials








▶  Build a Sonic Infinite Runner Game Using Kaplay — A two hour walkthrough of using the Kaplay game library (formerly known as Kaboom.js) to build a complete, if simple, Sonic-branded game. You can also play it here.


JSLegendDev






New Wallaby 2.0 - Works with All Editors - A Massive Step Forward for JavaScript Testing — Experience faster JavaScript debugging, real-time insights, & enhanced coverage monitoring with Wallaby 2.0's integrated UI.


Wallaby Team sponsor






Why I’m Skeptical of Rewriting JavaScript Tools in “Faster” Languages — Rewriting common JS infrastructure / build tools in ‘faster’ languages like Rust, Zig or Go has become popular in recent years, but is it necessary, asks Nolan?


Nolan Lawson






How to Create a Modern SPA with Django and Vue — If you can handle some Python in your life, Django is a powerful backend web framework and it’s quite happy to be paired up with a Vue.js frontend with GraphQL providing the glue.


The Dev Space






Learn How to Build a Full Stack Application Using React Native & Expo — Build a cross-platform full-stack app using a single codebase with scalable backend support and authentication.


Clerk sponsor




📄 Creating a 3D Hand Controller Using a Webcam, MediaPipe and Three.js Caio Bassetti


📄 How To Speed Up Your Vue App with Server Side Rendering Jakub Andrzejewski


📄 Angular’s Approach to Partial Hydration Loraine Lawson (The New Stack)


📄 Understanding npm audit and Fixing Vulnerabilities Niraj Chauhan


📄 Building a Mental Model of Node.js Streams Pavel Romanov



🛠 Code & Tools








match-sorter 7.0: Deterministic Best-Match Array Sorting — If you have an array of items you want to filter and sort ‘intelligently’ and deterministically, this offers a well-described, predictable algorithm. Play with a live CodeSandbox demo.


Kent C. Dodds






🤖 Transformers.js v3: Run Transformers in the Browser — A JS port of Hugging Face’s transformers Python library that can run natural language, vision, and audio machine learning models right in the browser. v3 adds WebGPU support for boosted performance and now supports Node, Deno and Bun too.


Hugging Face






Build Forms from JSON Using Drag & Drop UI — SurveyJS Libraries for Surveys & Forms — Integrate a JSON form editor with any backend. Enjoy complete control over your data with unlimited users and forms — no restrictions.


SurveyJS sponsor






Fetch Mock 12.0: Mock Requests by the fetch API — A flexible API for mocking HTTP requests made by fetch or fetch-imitating libraries. Supports browsers, Node, and web/service workers.


Rhys Evans






📊 Vizzu 0.14: A Library for Animated Data Visualizations — Making visualizations is one thing; animating them is much harder. Vizzu helps you create animated data stories and interactive explorers with a variety of showcase examples for inspiration.


Vizzu Inc.






eslint-plugin-functional: Rules to Promote Functional Programming — This isn’t for me, but if you want to encourage (or even force) a lack of mutation and a use of FP techniques in your codebase, this could be for you.


Jonas Kello






Radix Vue: Unstyled, Accessible Components for Vue.js — An unofficial Vue port of the popular Radix UI component library. GitHub repo.


zernonia et al.











📰 Classifieds




Meticulous automatically creates & maintains E2E UI tests. Zero flakes. Used by Lattice, Bilt Rewards and others.



SupaHooks: An Outbound Webhooks Template for Next.js.



⚙️ Create entire web apps with Reactile and let it handle your widgets and windows within a single browser tab. 1-month free trial. Try it now.