Plus TypeScript 4.8 RC, why the UK government ditched jQuery, and let's play some code golf. |
☀️ We're taking a rare week off next week for a brief summer vacation so there won't be any issue on August 19 – we'll be back on August 26, complete with a sun tan wind burn, and all the latest JavaScript news, of course :-)
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Peter Cooper, your editor. |
| Astro 1.0: The Fast Islands-Based Frontend Framework — Despite its relative youth, Astro has had a big impact already with a wide range of users and support for, well, almost every other framework or dev tool going. It's based around ‘islands’ where fast HTML can stand in for components which can then be lazily loaded in as user interactions demand. 1.0 introduces new image and picture components, MDX/Markdown support, and SSR builds. There’s a new homepage too. Fred Schott |
| Patterns.dev: Modern Web App Design Patterns — A free book you can download in PDF format or enjoy on the Web. Learn about lots of fundamentals, from how different styles of rendering or importing resources work to performance optimizations and case studies. There’s a lot to enjoy and a fantastic team behind it, too. Lydia Hallie, Addy Osmani, and Others |
| IN BRIEF: Three months on from 4.7, TypeScript 4.8 is now in release candidate stage. Most of the enhancements relate to inference, type narrowing, and file watching. 🔒 GitHub is proposing to use SigStore as a way for users and tools to verify npm package provenance as a way to improve security. The ▶️ latest episode of the TC39er podcast features an interview with Bloomberg's Robin Ricard, known for his work on the Records and Tuples proposal. Lizz Parody walks us through the proposal to support type annotations within JavaScript code (yes, not TypeScript!) |
| RELEASES: Playwright 1.25.0 – Browser remote control and runner toolkit.
Lerna 5.4 – Build system for multiple JS projects in one repo.
Fastify 4.4 – Fast, low overhead web framework.
NodeBB 2.4 – Node.js based forum software.
Color.js 0.4 – Color conversion & manipulation library. |
| 'How and Why We Removed jQuery from GOV.UK' — We’ve mentioned the UK government digital team’s culling of jQuery in passing a few times this year, but now there’s a (brief) explanation of how it happened. Andy Sellick (GDS) |
| How To Use Multithreading in Node.js — A practical walkthrough to how Node uses threads and how and why you might use worker threads yourself in a web app. Stanley Ulili (for DigitalOcean) |
| Million 1.12: A Fast and Small Virtual DOM Implementation — Focused on performance and shipping at under 1KB compressed, Million is ideal if you want an agnostic VDOM implementation to use when building your own framework or just to go a little lower level. “Think of it as if React’s API and Svelte’s compiler had a baby.” Million |
| OTHER QUICK RELEASES: Jayson 4.0 – JSON-RPC client/server for Node.
vite-plugin-eslint 1.8 – ESLint plugin for Vite.
Faker 7.4 – Generate massive amounts of fake data.
COBE 0.6 – 5KB WebGL globe lib. (Demo.)
html-to-image 1.10 – Generate images from DOM nodes.
Juice 8.1 – Inlines CSS stylesheets into your HTML source. |
| Node.js Developer (Remote or Warsaw) — Join our backend team responsible for CKEditor Cloud Services and develop an Open Source product used by millions of users worldwide.
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 |
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| If you've got a few minutes, ▶️ this video of a recent winning 'demo' from a demoscene contest is pretty mindblowing. The code was written in 2022, but is running on a 1981 IBM PC using CGA graphics and if you're old enough to have used such a machine (like me!) it's amazing what they've managed to squeeze out of it. As one commenter (Jeff Haluska) said: "I have been programming for about 25 years and Area 5150 has me questioning everything I know about computers." |
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