JavaScript Weekly Issue 708: October 10, 2024

#​708 — October 10, 2024

Read on the Web

JavaScript Weekly

TC39 Advances 10+ ECMAScript Proposals — The architects behind the development of the ECMAScript / JavaScript spec got together again this week (you can see them in this tweet) and they had a packed agenda. Import attributes, Iterator helpers, Promise.try and Regexp modifiers all made it to stage 4, and more besides.

Sarah Gooding (Socket)

🦖 Announcing Deno 2 — A huge release for the "what if I reinvented Node again from scratch?" runtime. Backwards compatibility with Node is a headline feature, but there’s a lot more baked in. Best, though, is the ▶️ epic ‘Announcing Deno 2’ video. After a slightly bombastic opener, Ryan presents a fantastic ‘keynote’ style tour of everything Deno has to offer – I enjoyed watching it.

Dahl, Belder, Iwańczuk and Jiang

💡 A neat new feature is Deno's Jupyter Notebook support which Simon Willison checks out here.

A Deeper Understanding of Web Security — Steve Kinney hosts this extensive video course on the challenges of web security. You'll gain a deeper understanding of security on the web, developing your mental model on how to approach things, explore common vulnerabilities, get hands-on experience with security tools, and get to grips with best practices.

Frontend Masters sponsor

Announcing TypeScript 5.7 Beta — The newest TypeScript is on the way. As always, a true laundry list of enhancements and new features, but the path rewriting for relative paths is a particularly welcome addition, enabling easy rewrites of .ts imports into .js at compile time.

Microsoft

IN BRIEF:

• Ian Grunert writes about work done to (re)enable JavaScriptCore's JIT mechanisms on Windows. This is particularly good news for Bun users.

• Did you know MySQL 9.0 now natively supports JavaScript stored routines?

• 🇺🇸 The next JSNation event is taking place in a hybrid form both remotely and in New York City this November 18 and 21. Some fantastic speakers await.

• Tenno is an interesting online Markdown editor that supports adding spreadsheet-like cells that can be populated by JavaScript.

• 🕹️ The winners of the latest js13kGames game jam have been announced. It's amazing what people have managed to achieve in just 13KB.

RELEASES:

• Bun v1.1.30 – Now includes experimental CSS parsing and bundling, as well as a bun publish to publish npm packages, a la npm publish. You can also compile code to bytecode to speed up startup times.

• Node.js v20.18.0 (LTS) – Now with network inspection support.

• React Native Storybook 8.3 – React Native support in the popular component workshop finally gets fully up to speed.

• Rsdoctor 0.4 – Tool for analyzing the Rspack / Webpack build process.

• ESLint 9.12.0, Electron.js 32.2, Ember 5.12

📒 Articles & Tutorials

Building a Local Single-Page App with htmx — If you have a reasonably simple app to build, using a large framework is probably going to be overkill. htmx to the rescue! Jake presents an easily followed practical tutorial packed with code.

Jake Lazaroff

💡 Jake also wrote an interesting case study of building a local-first app using SvelteKit and Shoelace, if you want to see something more fully-formed.

Product for Engineers: A Newsletter Helping Flex Your Product Muscle — Product for Engineers is dedicated to sharing the skills and strategies product engineers need to succeed.

PostHog sponsor

Build a Static RSS Reader To Fight Your Inner FOMO — The theme of lightweight JavaScript apps continues with a look at creating a basic RSS feed reader, that updates once a day, with Astro.

Karin Hendrikse

Node vs Bun: No Backend Performance Difference? — You can always trust a benchmark to ruffle some feathers, often over the methodology rather than the result. This is no exception, but interesting nonetheless.

Evert Heylen

▶ Building a Tic-Tac-Toe Game in TypeScript Types — One of those videos I enjoyed simply so I don’t ever feel tempted to try it myself.

Typed Rocks

Securing Node.js Express APIs with Clerk and React — Secure Express API endpoints and integrate authentication without the complexity of building it from scratch.

Clerk sponsor

📄 Building a Robust Frontend using Progressive Enhancement UK Government

📄 The Popover API: Your New Best Friend for Tooltips – Supported in all major browsers, except Safari on iOS. Sjoerd Beentjes

📄 18 Interview Questions Answered by Angular Experts Angular Space

📄 Testing CSS Print Media Styles with Cypress Gleb Bahmutov

🛠 Code & Tools

DOCX 9.0: Generate Word .docx Files from JavaScript — The code to lay out documents is verbose but there’s a lot of functionality baked in and there aren’t many other options for this task. Here’s a CodePen-based example to give you an idea. GitHub repo.

Dolan Miu

TinyJS: A Lightweight Way to Work with DOM Elements — Lighter than querySelector and friends, you ask? Not in file size, but certainly in code weight. TinyJS offers a jQuery-esque syntax for element selection, adding properties to elements, and more.

Victor Ribeiro

Breakpoints and console.log Is the Past, Time Travel Is the Future — 15x faster JavaScript debugging than with breakpoints and console.log, supports Vitest, jest, karma, jasmine, and more.

Wallaby Team sponsor

SVGuitar 2.4: Create SVG-Based Guitar Chord Charts — Dynamically generate chord charts / fingerings in the browser. You can experiment with it in this live demo.

Raphael Voellmy

Free Public APIs: A Collection of Free Public APIs for Developers — Categorized and searchable, these are tested daily by bots so if any API is taken down or moved behind a paywall, it's removed from the site.

Nick Schneeberger

TutorialKit 1.0: Create Interactive Coding Tutorials — StackBlitz’s framework for creating interactive coding tutorials, perhaps as a way to boost the adoption of your own libraries or design system. v1.0 marks TutorialKit as stable.

StackBlitz

Jeasx: The Ease of JSX with the Power of SSR — A new server side rendering framework built on top of JSX and Fastify.

Maik Jablonski

ip-address 10.0: Library for Parsing and Manipulating IP Addresses — Works with both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses.

Beau Gunderson

• React-Grid-Layout 1.5 – Draggable/resizable grid layouts for React apps.

• 🗓️ Schedule-X 2.4 – Material Design event calendar and date picker.

• eslint-plugin-unicorn 56.0 – 100+ useful ESLint rules in one place.

• Redwood 8.4 – Popular React app framework.