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.
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.
⌚ Spectra is a hackable smartwatch seeking funding on Kickstarter (but it has passed its initial goal). ESP32-S3 based, it appears able to run JavaScript as shown in the 'dev experience' screenshots.
🥖 Bun is on a roll.. with three releases in the past week. v1.1.31 added support for node:http2 server and gRPC, v1.1.32 added Node's crypto.hash method, and v1.1.33 was a bug-fix release.
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.
🤖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.
The Story of Web Framework Hono, By Its Creator — Hono is a neat, lightweight framework designed to run on any JavaScript runtime that has been picking up steam in the past year. You can create a simple app reminiscent of Express.js, say, but run it on Cloudflare Workers, Deno, Bun, or Node. It’s in heavy use all over the place, and has lots of interesting features like letting you write HTML with JSX.
Yusuke Wada
Supercharge Your Node.js Code Reviews with AI — Tired of event loop bottlenecks, async errors, and dependency vulnerabilities slipping through code reviews? CodeRabbit, an AI-powered code review tool, analyzes your codebase line-by-line, detecting perf issues, optimizing async patterns, and enhancing security with each pull request.
CodeRabbit sponsor
Node v23.0.0 (Current) Released — Say hello to the newest release line of Node.js that gets all the cutting edge features first (Node 22 will soon become an LTS release as per the usual schedule). Node v23 notably enables support for loading ES modules with require()by default, drops 32-bit Windows support, and node --run goes stable.
How to Build an Image Search App with CLIP, Postgres & JavaScript — A tutorial that brings together a lot of ideas in one place. CLIP is used to turn images into text descriptions. Postgres is used as a vector database. JavaScript provides the glue for both the frontend (with React) and backend (Node.js).
Haziqa Sajid
Using Sibling Parameters as Default Values in Functions — function myFunc(arg1, arg2 = arg1)? A technique safely in the ‘not a lot of people know you can do that’ pile. Alex digs into it a bit and looks at some use cases.
Over 100 Algorithms and Data Structures Demonstrated in JS — Examples of numerous common algorithms (e.g. bit manipulation, Pascal’s triangle, Hamming distance) and data structures (e.g. linked lists, tries, graphs) with explanations.
Node Version Manager Desktop 4.0 — A Tauri-powered desktop app for macOS, Windows and Linux to manage multiple installed versions of Node on your system.
🦖Announcing Deno 2 — A huge release for the “what if I reinvented Node again from scratch?” runtime. Backwards compatibility with Node is a headline feature, but there’s a lot more baked in. Best, though, is the ▶️ epic ‘Announcing Deno 2’ video. After a slightly bombastic opener, Ryan presents a fantastic ‘keynote’ style tour of everything Deno has to offer – I enjoyed watching it.
A Deeper Understanding of Web Security — Steve Kinney hosts this extensive video course on the challenges of web security. You'll gain a deeper understanding of security on the web, developing your mental model on how to approach things, explore common vulnerabilities, get hands-on experience with security tools, and get to grips with best practices.
Frontend Masters sponsor
Announcing TypeScript 5.7 Beta — The newest TypeScript is on the way. As always, a true laundry list of enhancements and new features, but the path rewriting for relative paths is a particularly welcome addition, enabling easy rewrites of .ts imports into .js at compile time.
Bun v1.1.30 – Now includes experimental CSS parsing and bundling, as well as a bun publish to publish npm packages, a la npm publish. You can also compile code to bytecode to speed up startup times.
Building a Local Single-Page App with htmx — If you have a reasonably simple app to build, using a large framework is probably going to be overkill. htmx to the rescue! Jake presents an easily followed practical tutorial packed with code.
Node vs Bun: No Backend Performance Difference? — You can always trust a benchmark to ruffle some feathers, often over the methodology rather than the result. This is no exception, but interesting nonetheless.
TinyJS: A Lightweight Way to Work with DOM Elements — Lighter than querySelector and friends, you ask? Not in file size, but certainly in code weight. TinyJS offers a jQuery-esque syntax for element selection, adding properties to elements, and more.
TutorialKit 1.0: Create Interactive Coding Tutorials — StackBlitz’s framework for creating interactive coding tutorials, perhaps as a way to boost the adoption of your own libraries or design system. v1.0 marks TutorialKit as stable.
VoidZero: A Next-Generation Toolchain for JavaScript — Not content to have merely created Vue.js and Vite, JavaScript powerhouse Evan You has unveiled his latest adventure: a $4.6m funded company building an open-source unified development toolchain for the JavaScript ecosystem. With his track record, this is as good an attempt as it gets.
Run GitHub Actions Up to 2x Faster at Half the Cost — Blacksmith runs your GitHub Actions substantially faster by running them on modern gaming CPUs. Integrating Blacksmith is a one-line code change. 100+ companies like Ashby, Superblocks, and Slope use Blacksmith to help developers merge code faster.
🕹️ OneJS is an attempt to bring JavaScript scripting into the Unity game engine. ▶️ Here's a screencast showing it off.
🎂 The Knip code decluttering tool celebrates two years with a new release containing a revamped auto-fix mechanism for automatically removing unused exports and files from your code.
▶ Bundling: The Past, Present and Future — A history lesson on bundlers, why they’re used, the problems they solve, the current ecosystem, and a look at the potential future for these tools.
🤖assistant-ui: React Components for AI Chat — It doesn’t just give you the interface components, but has integrations for Vercel AI, Langchain, and talking to other common LLM APIs (e.g. OpenAI), enabling you to build your own in-house AI chat system quickly. Examples.
Simon Farshid
qrframe: A Library to Generate 'Pretty' QR Codes — It's slightly odd as the QR codes generated aren’t guaranteed to scan reliably, but if you can generate ones that do, they look striking, and could be useful for branding/fun use cases. Play around with a live demo here.