Industry News

#​640 — May 25, 2023

Read on the Web

JavaScript Weekly

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

Microsoft

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

Rafael Gonzaga

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

Bryntum Grid sponsor

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

The Deno Team

⚡️ IN BRIEF:

• 
  

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

  
  


• 
  

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

  
  

RELEASES:

• 
  

  Astro 2.5

  
  


• 
  

  Preact 10.15 – Fast 3KB React alternative.

  
  


• 
  

  TypeScript 5.1 RC

  
  


• 
  

  Electron 24.4

  
  


• 
  

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

  
  

📒 Articles & Tutorials

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

Eli Bendersky

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

Mohamed Rasvi

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

Daniel Shiffman and Olivia Guzzardo

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

FusionAuth sponsor

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

Joscha Neske

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

Dr. Axel Rauschmayer

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

Mark O'Neill

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

Kamil Konopka

🛠 Code & Tools

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

Bytecode Alliance

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

Alex Grozav

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

Dynaboard sponsor

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

TypeCell

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

Michael Andreuzza

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

Lucas Löffel

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

Argos CI

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

Juan Luis Paz Rojas

React Authentication, Simplified

Userfront sponsor

• 
  

  Hashids.js 2.3
  
  ↳ Generate YouTube-like IDs.

  
  


• 
  

  Tabulator 5.5
  
  ↳ Interactive table and data grid control.

  
  


• 
  

  gridstack.js 8.2
  
  ↳ Dashboard layout and creation library.

  
  


• 
  

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

  
  


• 
  

  ReacType 16.0
  
  ↳ Visual prototyping tool that exports React code.

  
  


• 
  

  Mongoose 7.2 – MongoDB modelling library.

  
  


• 
  

  Eta (η) 2.2 – Embedded JS template engine.

  
  


• 
  

  AVA 5.3 – Popular Node test runner.

  
  


• 
  

  MelonJS 15.3 – HTML5 game engine.

  
  

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

→ Check out Node Weekly here.

#​639 — May 18, 2023

Read on the Web

JavaScript Weekly

Bun's New Bundler: 220x Faster than webpack? — Bun is one of the newest JavaScript runtimes (built atop the JavaScriptCore engine) and focuses on speed while aiming to be a drop-in replacement for Node.js. This week’s v0.6.0 release is the ‘biggest release yet’ with standalone executable generation and more, but its new JavaScript bundler and minifier may attract most of the attention and this post digs into why.

Jarred Sumner

🤔 If you'd prefer to read what a third party thinks, Shane O'Sullivan gave the new bundler a spin and shared his thoughts. There's also some discussion on Hacker News. It's early days and while esbuild may be fast enough for most right now, it's fantastic to see any progress in bundling.

Deopt Explorer: A VS Code Extension to Inspect V8 Trace Log Info — A thorough introduction to MS's new tool for performing analysis of the V8 engine’s internals, including CPU profile data, how inline caches operate, deoptimizations, how functions were run (interpreted or compiled) and more. There’s a lot going on.

Ron Buckton (Microsoft)

Supercharge Your Websites and Applications with Cloudflare — Get ready for supercharged speed and reliability with Cloudflare's suite of performance tools. With ultra-fast CDN, smart traffic routing, media optimization, and more, Cloudflare has everything you need to ensure your site or app runs at peak performance.

Cloudflare sponsor

jQuery 3.7.0 Released — JavaScript Weekly is 638 issues old, or almost 13 years once you take away weeks off, so jQuery was a big deal in our early days. We hold a lot of nostalgia for it, and it remains widely used even if no-one is writing about it anymore 😆 v3.7 folds the Sizzle selector engine into the core, adds some unitless CSS properties, gains a new uniqueSort method, and “major changes” are still promised in future. jQuery lives on!

Timmy Willison (jQuery Foundation)

⚡️ IN BRIEF:

• 
  

  TC39's Hemanth.HM has begun keeping a list of ES2023 code examples like he did for ES2022, ES2021, and ES2020.

  
  


• 
  

  🤔 The New Stack has a story about Meta supporting the OpenJS Foundation – but who wrote the article is what we found more interesting..

  
  


• 
  

  The folks at Meta / Facebook have written about the efficiency gains made in Messenger Desktop by moving from Electron to React Native.

  
  


• 
  

  One downside to platforms like Cloudflare Workers using V8 isolates has been a lack of support for opening TCP sockets – quite an impediement if you want to talk to a RDBMS over TCP or something. Fear no more, Cloudflare Workers has introduced a connect() API for creating TCP sockets from Workers functions.

  
  


• 
  

  Promise.withResolvers progressed to stage 2 at the latest TC39 meeting.

  
  

RELEASES:

• 
  

  Node.js 20.2

  
  


• 
  

  Rome 12.1
  
  ↳ The formatter/linter gains stage 3 decorator support.

  
  


• 
  

  Ember.js 5.0 – App framework.

  
  


• 
  

  Jasmine 5.0 – Testing framework.

  
  


• 
  

  Gatsby 5.10

  
  

📒 Articles & Tutorials

How to Get Full Type Support with Plain JavaScript — It’s possible to reap the benefits of TypeScript, yet still write plain JavaScript, as TypeScript’s analyzer understands types written in the JSDoc format.

Pausly

TypeScript's own JS Projects Utilizing TypeScript page has more info on the different levels of strictness you can follow from mere inference on regular JS code through to full on TypeScript with strict enabled.

▶  Coding a Working Game of Chess in Pure JavaScript — No canvas, either. All using the DOM, SVG, and JavaScript. No AI and it’s not perfect, but it’s only 88 minutes long and it’ll give you something to work on..

Ania Kubow

Automate Slack and MS Teams Notifications Using Node.js — Quick guide to send and automate messages via Slack, MS Teams, and any other channel from your Node.js applications.

Courier.com sponsor

Your Jest Tests Might Be Wrong — Is your Jest test suite failing you? You might not be using the testing framework’s full potential, especially when it comes to preventing state leakage between tests.

Jamie Magee

A Guide to Visual Regression Testing with Playwright — The Playwright browser control library can form the basis of an end-to-end testing mechanism all written in JavaScript, and comparing the visual output of tests can help show where things are going wrong.

Dima Ivashchuk (Lost Pixel)

Create a Real Time Multi Host Video Chat in a Browser with Amazon IVS

Amazon Web Services (AWS) sponsor

React Server Components, Next.js App Router and Examples — Addy Osmani’s overview of of the state of React Server Components, the Next.js App Router implementation, other implementations, the move towards hybrid rendering, plus related links.

Addy Osmani

..and if React is your thing, the latest issue of React Status is for you.

🛠 Code & Tools

VanJS: A 1.2KB Reactive UI Framework Without JSX — A new entrant to an increasingly crowded space, 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. It’s short for vanilla JavaScript, by the way.. GitHub repo.

Tao Xin

JavaScript Scratchpad for VS Code (2m+ Downloads) — Quokka.js is the #1 tool for exploring/testing JavaScript with edit-continue experience to see realtime execution and runtime values.

Wallaby.js sponsor

Introducing Legend-State 1.0: Faster State for React — Another state management solution? After a year of effort, Legend State 1.0 claims to be the fastest option “on just about every metric” and they have the benchmarks to prove it. Whatever the case, this thorough intro is worth a look. GitHub repo.

Moo․do

Starry Night: GitHub-Like Syntax Highlighting — Apparently, GitHub’s own syntax highlighting approach isn’t open source, but this takes a similar approach and is. It’s admittedly quite 'heavy' (due to using a WASM build of the Oniguruma regex engine) but that’s the price of quality.

Titus Wormer

Garph 0.5: A Fullstack GraphQL Framework for TypeScript — Full-stack ‘batteries included’ GraphQL APIs without codegen. GitHub repo.

Step CI

headless-qr: A Simple, Modern QR Code Library — A slimmer adaptation of an older project without the extra code that isn’t necessary today. Turning the binary into an image is your job, or use something like QRCode.js if you want a canvas-rendered QR code out of the box.

Rich Harris

Scroll Btween: Use Scroll Position to Tween CSS Values on DOM Elements — Scrolling/parallax libraries tend to feel the same but this one demonstrates some diverse examples with colors, images, and text — all with no dependencies.

Olivier Blanc

eslint-plugin-check-file: Rules for Consistent Filename and Folder Names — Allows you to enforce a consistent naming pattern for file and directory names in projects.

Huan

• 
  

  Transformers.js 2.0 – Run Hugging Face transformers directly in browser.

  
  


• 
  

  PrimeReact 9.4 – Extensive UI component library.

  
  


• 
  

  The Lounge 4.4 – Cross-platform, self-hosted web IRC client.

  
  


• 
  

  Faast.js 8.0 – Serverless batch computing made simple.

  
  

😎 Go with the flow..

js2flowchart.js — A visualization library to convert JavaScript code into attractive SVG flowcharts. Luckily, there’s a live online version if you want to play without having to install anything.

Bohdan Liashenko

#​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.

  
  

🤫 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!