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 |
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 |
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: 🤖 Microsoft has introduced Copilot Edits in VS Code – it provides a way to work across multiple files in a project at once. Jawsm is an early-stage, experimental JavaScript to WebAssembly compiler (akin to Porffor) but that aims to use the most advanced WASM features off the bat, such as WasmGC and exception handling. 💜 CSS now has an official logo! |
RELEASES: Expo SDK 52 – Toolset for building modern React Native apps, now supporting React Native 0.76 and the New Architecture. Node.js v18.20.5 (LTS) – Lots of dependency updates and now import attributes and JSON modules are marked stable. No announcement, but it looks like Ember 6.0 is about to land. Node.js v23.2.0 (Current), pnpm 9.13, Parcel 2.13.0 |
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 |
▶ 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 |
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 |
📊 visx 3.12 – Airbnb's suite of React visualization components now includes a Sankey diagram component. 🖼️ Fabric.js 6.5 – Makes HTML5 Canvas elements more interactive with an object model and operations. GitHub repo. DOMPurify 3.2 – Fast, tolerant XSS sanitizer for HTML and SVG. Demo. MikroORM 6.4 – Popular TypeScript ORM for Node.js. Marked 15.0 – Fast Markdown compiler / parser. |
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! | |