The unbearable weight of massive JavaScript

#​664 — November 23, 2023

Read on the Web

JavaScript Weekly

Time to Take the State of JavaScript 2023— The long standing State of JavaScript survey is back for another run at figuring out what the community is up to and what tools we’re using. The results are always illuminating and we’ll share the tastiest parts once available.

Devographics

▶  The Unbearable Weight of Massive JavaScript— An extensive talk looking at what can be achieved by simplifying web architecture, chiefly by using new or upcoming Web Platform APIs and getting back to building fast, maintainable, user-friendly frontends. Slidedeck.

Ryan Townsend

Stop Building Auth, Start Building Apps with EdgeDB + Next.js— It’s hard enough to come up with an idea worth trying. See how EdgeDB and our new authentication extension makes it easy to go from idea to working application in record time using Next.js.

EdgeDB sponsor

TypeScript 5.3 Released— The latest edition of the type-enhanced JavaScript superset is here. The headline feature is full support for the import attributes proposal (as it currently stands, at stage 3 in TC39), but there are many enhancements around type narrowing, interactive inlay hints for types in editors, and more. Not the biggest update, but progress nonetheless.

Daniel Rosenwasser (Microsoft)

Vite 5.0 Released— The Vite suite of frontend tooling may have started life in the Vue.js world, but is now used by projects aplenty including SvelteKit, Remix, and Astro. v5 now uses Rollup 4, removes many deprecated features, and requires Node 18+. There’s a migration guide to help with your v4 to v5 progression.

Evan You and Contributors

IN BRIEF:

• The Node.js 20.x runtime is now available on AWS Lambda.

• 🎁 A bumper list of dev-related tools & services running Black Friday deals.

• GitHub looks at what's new in the latest Git release: Git 2.43.

• The AWS Amplify team teases 'Gen 2' of their fullstack app platform.

RELEASES:

• ⭐️ Transformers.js v2.9– State of the art ML in JavaScript. v2.9 adds support for depth estimation, zero-shot object detection, and optical document understanding.

• Redux Toolkit 2.0 rc.0, Redux 5.0 rc.0, React-Redux 9.0 rc.0– Initial RCs with better packaging and smaller bundles. Final releases due soon.

• Bun 1.0.14– Introduces a high-perf globbing API for matching files and strings.

• Rspack 0.4 including Rsbuild 0.1 – A fast Rust-based web bundler.

• Node v21.2.0 (Current) and Node v20.10.0 (LTS)

• Starlight 0.13.0– Beautiful docs sites atop Astro.

📄 Articles & Tutorials

▶  4 Web Devs, 1 App Idea— Salma Alam-Naylor, Scott Tolinski, and Eve Porcello join Jason Lengstorf to kick off a fun new series where several developers all implement the same type of app, show off how they went about it, and react to each other’s approaches. Svelte, Astro, and Next.js each make an appearance.

Learn with Jason

Promises Training— Practice working with promises through a curated collection of interactive challenges. Aimed at developers with at least an intermediate understanding of promises who want to dig deeper.

Henrique Inonhe

JavaScript Error and Performance Monitoring— Track, trace, debug and resolve JavaScript errors across platforms. Are your releases that easy? Join us live.

Sentry sponsor

An Attempted Taxonomy of Web Components— A collection of open-source web components (and lessons learned from using them) that may help you on your journey in this complex, developing space.

Zach Leatherman

Using OpenAI APIs to Analyze Automated Test Failures— A look at how to develop a Nightwatch.js plugin which sends the test failure and associated errors to a service that integrates with OpenAI’s platform to analyze said errors and provide actionable feedback.

Andrei Rusu

🛠 Code & Tools

Bruno: An Open-Source HTTP API Exploration App— There are a lot of ‘API client’ tools like this, commercial and non-commercial, with varying levels of features, but this is an open source one entirely built in JavaScript with a fully-offline ethos some might appreciate. GitHub repo.

Anoop M D, Anusree P S and Contributors

debounce 2.0: Delay Function Calls Until a Set Time Elapses— If you don’t want something to run too often, debouncing is the strategy for you and this library makes it simple. v2 adds types and brings the code up to modern standards.

Sindre Sorhus et al.

Level Up Your UX With Bryntum— Empower your users with advanced widgets like data grids, calendars, schedulers, and Gantt charts.

Bryntum sponsor

H3: A Minimal HTTP Framework for Multiple JS Platforms— Aims to be as universal as possible and works across numerous platforms, including Node, while offering the basic HTTP framework features and a compatibility layer with Express middleware. v1.9 just landed.

UnJS

request-animation-frames: Use requestAnimationFrame Anywhere— The latest library from the one-man module powerhouse, Sindre Sorhus. The idea this time is to allow you to use requestAnimationFrame in any JavaScript environment. The implementation is delightfully simple.

Sindre Sorhus

Spectral.js: A More 'Paint-Like' Color Mixing Library— If you have two colors to transition between, just tweening the RGB values can result in some rather ugly intermediate colors. Spectral.js uses Kubelka–Munk theory which more closely matches how paints work for a visually satisfying result.

Ronald van Wijnen

'A Node + TypeScript + ts-node + ESM Experience That Works'— It’s just three files: package.json, tsconfig.json and a utilities file.

Khalid Zoabi

A Non-Cloud Alternative to Google Forms That Has It All

SURVEYJS sponsor

🖼 medium-zoom 1.1: A Library for Medium-Style Image Zooming— Responsive, can load a higher definition version of an image on zoom, and mouse, keyboard and gesture friendly. Now we just need a library that can cover up the bottom half of a page with junk like Medium also does now. Demo.

François Chalifour

• gridstack.js 10.0– Build interactive dashboard panels quickly.

• MQTT.js 5.3– MQTT client for Node and browser.

• Piscina 4.2– Node.js worker thread pool implementation.

• (Official) MongoDB Node.js Driver 6.3

• SQL Formatter 14.0– Pretty print SQL queries.

P.S. Medium is 🗑️. If you don't want to host your own blog, try Hashnode, dev.to, Bear, or even throw Markdown at GitHub Gists – it'll provide a better reader experience and we'll be more likely to link to it.