JavaScript Weekly Issue 464: November 22, 2019

#464 — November 22, 2019

Read on the Web

JavaScript Weekly

Postwoman: An API Request Builder and Tester — A free alternative to Postman, a popular app for debugging and testing HTTP APIs. Postwoman works in the browser and supports HTTP and WebSocket requests as well as GraphQL. Insomnia is a similar tool if you want to run something as a desktop app.

Liyas Thomas

The State of JavaScript on the Web by the HTTP Archive — The HTTP Archive has released an annual ‘state of the Web’ report focused on data collected from six million sites. There are numerous findings here, including how much JavaScript the Web uses, how long it takes browsers to parse that JavaScript, and what frameworks and libraries are most popularly used.

Houssein Djirdeh

Get Best in Class Error Reporting for Your JavaScript Apps — Time is money. Software bugs waste both. Save time with Bugsnag. Automatically detect and diagnose errors impacting your users. Get comprehensive diagnostic reports, know immediately which errors are worth fixing, and debug in minutes. Try it free.

Bugsnag sponsor

The Differences Between the Same App Created in React and Svelte — Several issues ago we linked to Sunil’s article comparing the same app written in React and Vue and now he’s back with a side by side comparison of some of the differences between an app built in React and Svelte, an increasingly popular build-time framework.

Sunil Sandhu

Node Gains Enabled-By-Default Support for ECMAScript Modules — Node.js 13.2.0 came out this week with both an upgrade to V8 and unflagged support for using ES modules. There are some rules to using them, and you might find this V8 blog entry on JavaScript modules worth revisiting to get a feel for what’s involved. Time to play!

Node.js Foundation

jQuery Core Migrating from AMD Modules to ES Modules — Before you say jQuery isn’t relevant, the HTTP Archive has revealed that it’s being used on ~85% of around 6 million sites.

jQuery

Pika Opens Its 'Write Once, Run Natively Everywhere' JavaScript Registry for Early Access — Rather than authors being responsible for formatting and configuring packages, the registry takes care of it. You write the code, they, in theory, do the rest (including creating TypeScript type declarations). Sadly it’s behind an email wall for now, so watch this space.

Pika

💻 Jobs

Full Stack Engineer — Expensify seeks a self-driven individual passionate about making code effective, with an understanding of algorithms and design patterns.

Expensify

Senior Web Frontend Engineer (CA, IL or NC) — Design what machine learning "looks" like to improve the manufacturing of millions of things. We value great tools like fast builds, simple deploys, & branch environments.

Instrumental

Find a Job Through Vettery — Make a profile, name your salary, and connect with hiring managers from top employers. Vettery is completely free for job seekers.

Vettery

📘 Articles & Tutorials

Getting Started with an Express.js and ES6+ JavaScript Stack — With typical Smashing Magazine quality, this is a thorough beginner-level walkthrough, this time covering how to get started with Node in building a web app backed by a MongoDB database. Definitely for beginners though.

Jamie Corkhill

Techniques for Instantiating Classes — Dr. Axel walks through several approaches for creating instances of classes.

Dr. Axel Rauschmayer

How To Build a Sales Dashboard with React — Improve your data visualization with JavaScript UI controls. Build interactive dashboards quickly and easily.

Wijmo by GrapeCity sponsor

▶ We Should Rebrand JavaScript. Yep? Nope? — A podcast where two pairs of JavaScript developers debate an idea that was recently floated.. should we rebrand JavaScript?

JS Party podcast

Compile-Time Immutability in TypeScript — How to achieve compile-time immutability in TypeScript with const assertions and recursive types.

James Wright

Having Fun with ES6 Proxies — Proxies aren’t going to be useful in day to day programming for most JavaScript developers, but they open up some interesting opportunities if you want more control over how objects behave and are worth understanding.

Maciej Cieślar

▶ How to Build a Budget Calculator App with Angular — A 2 hour video that walks through the entire process of building an Angular app. The gentle pace is well aimed at those new to Angular or the tooling involved.

Devstackr

Composing Angular Components with TypeScript Mixins

Giancarlo Buomprisco

Hey Node Helps You Think, Prototype, and Solve in Node.js — Transforming data, package.json, the module system and more. Bite-size, info-packed tutorials with videos and use cases.

Hey Node by Osio Labs sponsor

Cropping Images to a Specific Aspect Ratio with JavaScript — How to use the HTML canvas API and some basic math to build a tiny crop helper function, making it easy to quickly crop images in various aspect ratios.

Rik Schennink

🔧 Code & Tools

EasyDB: A 'One-Click' Server-Free Database — A quick way to provision a temporary database (that’s basically a key/value store) and use it from JavaScript. Ideal for hackathons or quick once-off scripts, perhaps.

Jake and Tyson

Nodemon: Automatically Restart a Node App When Files Are Changed — A development-time tool to monitor for any changes in your app and automatically restart the server. v2.0 has just been released with CPU and memory use improvements and far fewer dependencies.

Remy Sharp

GraphQuill: Real-Time GraphQL API Exploration in VS Code — A way to test GraphQL API endpoints from within VS Code so you don’t have to keep jumping between multiple tools.

OSLabs Beta

Open Realtime Data - A User’s Guide with Links to a Free Streaming Platform

Ably sponsor

Lambda API: A Lightweight Web Framework for Serverless Apps — A stripped down framework that takes an Express-esque approach to putting together serverless JavaScript apps to run on AWS Lambda behind API Gateway.

Jeremy Daly

ScrollTrigger: Let Your Page React to Scroll Changes — Triggers classes based on the current scroll position. So, for example, when an element enters the viewport you can fade it in.

Erik Terwan

Siriwave: The Apple Siri 'Waveform' Replicated in a JS Library

Flavio Maria De Stefano