JavaScript Weekly Issue 538: May 14, 2021

#​538 — May 14, 2021

Unsubscribe | Read on the Web

JavaScript Weekly

Angular 12 Released — Angular is surely turning out to be one of Google’s most reliable projects and while v12 isn’t exactly a revolution, it’s a strong step down the full transition to Ivy, Angular’s next generation compilation and rendering pipeline.

Mark Techson

'Babel Is Used by Millions, So Why Are We Running Out of Money?' — If you spend much time on Twitter, you may have seen this story take off in a big way after the original creator of Babel (and now Rome) tweeted a (now deleted) thread questioning Babel's use of funds (there was tons of discussion about it on Hacker News, too). Regardless, Babel is a fundamental JavaScript project, its team does a lot of great work, and it's worth supporting — we've just donated.

Babel Core Team

How to Pay Down Tech Debt in JavaScript Apps — In today’s fast-paced development world, teams are under pressure to release quickly but that introduces more bugs and tech debt. Discover how leading web teams pay down tech debt to speed innovation and deliver stable apps to users. Watch the webinar.

Bugsnag sponsor

Deno 1.10 Released — A nice evolutionary bump for Deno this week with, I feel, the most interesting feature being Web Storage API support. Yes, it's localStorage and sessionStorage but server-side and working much like they do in the browser.. There are big improvements to the testing tools, too. And if you're still unsure about Deno, maybe Minna Niemi's practical 20-minute video will sell you on it.

The Deno Team

Announcing TypeScript 4.3 Release Candidate — I recently saw someone opine that frequent releases and improvements correlate to a project's long term success, and if that’s true, TypeScript is doing great 😄 There's a list of tweaks and improvements as long as a K-Mart receipt including import statement completions and template string type improvements.

Daniel Rosenwasser (Microsoft)

Quick Bits

• Azure Static Web Apps, Azure's system for building and hosting statically generated sites, is now generally available.
• It's not exactly JavaScript, but WebAssembly Cloud is an interesting single page experiment for letting you play with WebAssembly directly in the browser using Rust.
• Google Docs is planning to switch from HTML-based rendering to Canvas-based rendering. It's an interesting development and has many worrying about the accessibility implications. Google offers a demo document if you want to see it in action.

Releases

Docusaurus 2 Beta — Elegant documentation site generator.
Cypress 7.3.0 — Popular testing system.
postcss-loader 4.3.0 — PostCSS loader for webpack.
react-bootstrap 1.6.0 — Bootstrap components for React.

📖 Articles, Opinions & Tutorials

Lessons on Writing JavaScript and React from ClojureScript — ClojureScript is essentially a Clojure (the Lisp dialect and functional language) to JavaScript compiler and going down the functional path often leads developers to various epiphanies. Ryan is keen to share his experience.

Ryan Jerue

Performance-Testing the Google I/O Site — Another solid performance review from Jake here, this time looking at how the Google I/O site fares on a 3G mobile connection. (Spoiler: It’s rather slow)

Jake Archibald

[Free Download] Guide to Effective Feature Management — Learn feature management practices to accelerate release cycles and deploy every 6 hours, instead of every 6 weeks.

LaunchDarkly sponsor

Why JWT Should Not Be Your Default for Sessions — "My point in all this is not to discourage the use of JWT in general, but be deliberate and careful when you do. Be aware of both the security and functionality trade-offs and pitfalls."

Evert Pot

Migrating From Parcel to Snowpack – A Build Tool Comparison
Ben Frain

Why I Finally Chose React Over Vue
Bill Wohlers

How to Use the Vibration API on Your Site
Bibek Kakati

mo.js 1: A Motion Graphics Toolbelt for the Web — We first linked to this six years ago but it only recently hit a 1.0 release. It offers a declarative API and gives you full control over animations. There are several tutorials on offer if you want to see how it works.

Oleg Solomka, Xavier Foucrier, Jonas Sandstedt

Elder.js: An 'SEO-First' Svelte-Based Framework — An opinionated static site generator designed for building SEO-friendly sites at scale. We featured this last year, but it’s under active development and has had another push lately. GitHub repo.

Elder.js Team

An Angular Data Grid That Makes Life Easy Does Exist. Give It a Try

Kendo UI for Angular sponsor

Prettier 2.3: The Opinionated Code Formatter — Not a huge release but a notable milestone is official support for formatting HTML templates written with Handlebars.

Georgii Dolzhykov

Spearmint: A Simpler Way to Test Your React App — "In short, this tool generates executable JavaScript test-code based on custom data input from the developer."

spearmint.js team

Free Chat & Activity Feed APIs for Qualifying Teams — The Stream Maker Account provides qualifying teams with full and free access to Stream's Chat and Activity Feed APIs, making them accessible to side projects and new startups. No credit card is required.

Stream sponsor

Eva.js: A Front-End Game Engine for Creating Interactive Projects — Includes components that are ready to use out-of-the-box and it uses PixiJS for performant WebGL rendering. Try it in this live playground. GitHub repo.

EVA

htmr 1.0: HTML String to React Element Conversion Library
Fatih Kalifa

📷 Vision Camera 2.0: A Powerful Camera for React Native Apps
Cuvent Technologies UG

Vuetify 2.5: A Material Design Framework for Vue.js
Vuetify

⚛️ React developer? Check out the latest issue of React Status, our sibling newsletter about all things relating to React from tutorials and screencasts to news and releases. While we do include some React items in JavaScript Weekly, we save most of it for there.
Check out React Status today.