An easy way to experiment with signals
#683 — April 11, 2024
JavaScript Weekly
Frontend Development Beyond React: Svelte — A surprisingly thorough article going deep into one developer’s research into using Svelte to build modern front-end apps. If you’ve never experimented with Svelte, this is a good primer to the key concepts, tradeoffs, and techniques involved.
Héla Ben Khalfallah
🛠 A JS Bin to Play with the TC39 Signals Proposal — Last week, we featured the proposal to add signals to JavaScript and by way of a polyfill, you can get experimenting with it right now.
NullVoxPopuli
Add Excel-Like Spreadsheet Functionality to Your JavaScript Apps — 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 MESCIUS inc sponsor
zx v8.0: Write Better Shell Scripts with Node — A popular way to make shell scripting a more pleasant experience in Node with useful wrappers around child_process, argument escaping, and sensible defaults. v8.0 makes zx 20x smaller, faster, makes it easier to kill processes, pass input to commands & more.
IN BRIEF:
Val Town is a fantastic online platform for writing and deploying TypeScript functions right from the browser and has just raised $5.5m in funding.
The set methods proposal advanced to stage 4 at TC39 this week. Promise.try and Math.sumPrecise have advanced to stage 2.7.
🚗 What happens if 𝕏 you hack a car with JavaScript?
Cloudflare has added a JS-native RPC to Cloudflare Workers.
A recap of Angular developments at the recent ngConf 2024 event.
RELEASES:
ESLint 9.0 – A significant release with lots of cleanups, a new no-useless-assignment rule, and numerous tweaks and changes.
VitePress 1.1 – Vite & Vue-powered static site generator.
npm 10.5.2 – It’s now 𝕏 faster to run scripts, though we’re talking milliseconds nowadays.
Node.js April 10 Security Releases – Including v18.20.2 (LTS), v20.12.1 (LTS), and v21.7.3 (Current).
We mentioned Gulp 5’s release last week, but missed the announcing Gulp v5 post explaining why it’s a big deal.
📒 Articles & Tutorials
On Developing Figma Plugins — Some interesting observations on the experience of creating Figma plugins in JavaScript, including how they’re sandboxed and some implementation details of the author’s own plugin.
Tom MacWright
React Server Components in a Nutshell — A quick overview of RSCs not all about Next.js, comparing the approach taken by several frameworks before sharing thoughts on the tech and why the smaller Waku framework is worth a look.
Paul Scanlon (The New Stack)
Using AI-Powered Autofix to Fix Your Broken Code — Join Sentry live on April 25th, to preview Autofix and learn how we are using ML to prioritize issues and alerts.
Sentry sponsor
Some DevTools Tips and Tricks — Most developers barely scratch the surface of what DevTools can accomplish, says the author, who shares ten tips here.
Pankaj Parashar
📄 Object Structure in JavaScript Engines – You rarely need to know how objects are internally represented in JavaScript engines, but if you want to.. Frontend Almanac
📄 The Easiest Way to Build Reactive Local-First Apps, with TinyBase and PowerSync Benedikt Müller
📄 Building an Article Recommendation System with Upstash, Fly and OpenAI Rishi Raj Jain
📄 Browser Security Bugs That Aren’t: JavaScript in PDFs ericlaw
📄 Exploring Authentication in Next.js Robin Wieruch
🛠 Code & Tools
Madge 7.0: Create Graphs From Your Module Dependencies — A tool for generating a visual graph of module dependencies, finding circular dependencies, and discovering other useful info.
Patrik Henningsson
PythonMonkey: A JavaScript Engine in the Python VM — If you need to use Python but also want to run JavaScript, this gives you a way to do it with the Mozilla SpiderMonkey JS engine embedded into the Python runtime with Python providing the host environment.
Distributive
❤️ Loving console.log Is Easy, but Hate 😡 Losing Context to View Messy Output — Developer productivity tools Wallaby.js, Quokka.js and Console Ninja show console.log values and errors right next to your code.
Wallaby Team sponsor
Faces.js: A Library for Generating Vector-Based Cartoon Faces — The end results are somewhat reminiscent of how the Nintendo Wii generates random Miis. Faces are drawn as SVGs with each also represented by a JavaScript object so you can draw them again later.
ZenGM
Color.js 0.5: ‘Let’s Get Serious About Color’ — A fantastic library for working with colors in the browser, following the latest specs. It’s even been used by browsers to test their CSS Color 4/5 implementations.
Lea Verou and Chris Lilley
Preview.js: Preview UI Components Instantly in Your IDE — Namely, VS Code or JetBrain IDEs, out of the box. Compatible with components built for React, Vue, Svelte and Solid.
Zenc Labs Pty
Kosko: Organize Kubernetes Manifests in JavaScript — Version 4.1 has just been released with a new plugin system.
Tommy Chen
Transformational Auth & Identity | Userfront — “Compared to our previous experiences in the security/auth space, Userfront is an order of magnitude simpler to use.”
Userfront sponsor
Mikro ORM 6.2 – TypeScript ORM for Node.js based on Data Mapper. SQL Server and libSQL/Turso join the list of supported databases.
Rspack 0.6 – Fast Rust-based web bundler.
Pixi.js 8.1 – The fast WebGL and WebGPU 2D graphics engine switches back to WebGL by default due to immature browser support.
Jotai 2.8 – Simple, flexible state management for React.
DOMPurify 2.5 – Fast, tolerant XSS sanitizer for HTML and SVG.
Reveal.js 5.1 – Framework for building presentations in HTML.
Xterm.js 5.5 – Create terminal experiences on the Web.
TIFF 6.0 – Pure JS TIFF image decoder.
Shiki 1.3 – Powerful syntax highlighter.
🛞 It’s wheely good..
Remember the iPod’s click wheel? It’s back. In JavaScript form!
