#676 — February 22, 2024
JavaScript Weekly
📊 Apache ECharts 5.5: The Powerful Visualization Library — ECharts’ big selling point, beyond being a well supported Apache-backed project, is its balance of power and simplicity. You can do a lot with it (check out the many examples here) without the code becoming complex. v5.5 enhances its ESM support, adds server-side rendering support, and lets you make incomplete pie charts.
Apache Software Foundation
💌 If you need to be convinced further, check out Alice GG’s Love Letter to Apache ECharts.
📣 The React Team Shares What It’s Been Working On — Work on React Compiler has progressed with it now powering Instagram’s prod site (‘React 19 Will Be Compiled’ goes into depth on what the compiler means for most React devs). We also learn React 19 is on the way and will include breaking changes to support things like Web Components.
The React.js Core Team
Register for POST/CON 24! Coming April 30-May 1 — Join hundreds of developers in San Francisco on April 30 and May 1 for hands-on API workshops, presentations from industry leaders, and a big reveal of Postman product updates.
Postman sponsor
Redwood v7.0: The React + GraphQL App Framework — Redwood is a full-stack Web framework that takes an opinionated approach, bringing together React, GraphQL, Prisma, and TypeScript, with a focus on building complete apps rapidly. v7 includes a new observability tool called Redwood Studio, realtime GraphQL features, and more.
RedwoodJS Community
Node.js’s 2023 Summarized — Rafael, of the Node.js TSC and Fastify core team, shares a useful update on the evolution of Node.js over the past year, how the team ensures Node is well tested and reliable, changes to Node’s vendor dependencies (of which it gained three in 2023), as well as enhancements to Node’s security and Web presence.
Rafael Gonzaga
IN BRIEF:
🐢 The Node.js project has unveiled Rocket Turtle, its new mascot!
1 in 5 of the most popular, ‘high impact‘ packages on npm now include ESM.
👾 A ‘Frogger’ game in 256 bytes? Yes, really. Be sure to View Source.
A visualization of Math.random() distributions of various kinds.
The Deno team has revamped its onboarding tutorials for Deno Deploy, if you want to experiment with JavaScript at the edge.
RELEASES:
Bun 1.0.28 – Mostly a bugfix/stability release.
Puppeteer 22.2 – Control Chrome with Node.js. Now on Chrome 122.
Deno 1.41, Rollup 4.12.0, Jest Puppeteer 10.0
📒 Articles & Tutorials
A Guide to Using localStorage in Modern Apps — localStorage has been supported in most browsers for fifteen years plus now, so it’s a reliable way to store data client-side, though there are still situations where you wouldn’t want to use it. A good primer, but with a focus on alternative options.
RxDB Project
How to Set Up a Basic Node Server App with TypeScript in 2024 — Popular dev educator Jason with a quick tutorial on how to set up a modern Node project with TypeScript, live reloading, and loading in environment variables.
Jason Lengstorf
Transformational Auth & Identity | Userfront — Userfront is an auth & identity platform that transforms your business to serve free, freemium and enterprise customers.
Userfront sponsor
▶ Pac-Man in JavaScript in 1 Hour — I felt old when Ania said “if you’ve never played Pac-Man before..” 😅 – nonetheless, she’s back with another of her fantastic, thorough walkthroughs.
Ania Kubów
HTMX vs React: A Complete Comparison — It strikes me as tricky to compare two very different approaches to what will often be distinct use cases, but undoubtedly people will want to weigh them up against each other, so here you go.
Antonello Zanini and Dan Ackerson
How Qwik Differs From React Hydration — Qwik works quite differently to the React approach.
Paul Scanlon (The New Stack)
An Ultimate Vim Vue Setup — How to set up Vue/Nuxt autocompletion for Vim/Neovim.
Nikola Đuza
🛠 Code & Tools
Perspective 2.8: Fast Streaming Data Visualization via WebAssembly — A data visualization component, well-suited for large and/or streaming datasets, that can be used from both JavaScript and Python. It’s been fun watching this library improve over the past couple of years. The docs have been improved a lot. GitHub repo.
Perspective Authors
Hookdeck: The Amazon EventBridge Alternative — Receive, send, and route messages across your event-driven applications with an event gateway for engineering teams.
Hookdeck sponsor
Vuestic Admin: A Vue 3 Admin Template — A recently redesigned, modern admin template using Vue 3, Vite, Pinia, and Tailwind CSS. Check out the live demo or GitHub repo.
Epicmax LLC
🗓 Tommy’s Inclusive Datepicker: A Human-Friendly Date Picker — Try out this Web Component on the homepage itself. The user can type natural language phrases like “Next Friday” or “in 30 days” and the picker will move to the correct date. GitHub repo.
Tommy Feldt
Skeleton: Reactive, Accessible Svelte UI Toolkit — A cool feature of the homepage is you can try out the different built-in themes, including dark and light modes, using a drop-down at the top.
Skeleton Labs
Dax: Cross-Platform Shell Tools for Node — Similar to Google’s zx but uses a cross-platform shell with common built-in commands so more code will work across platforms. Dax was originally written for Deno but now supports Node too.
David Sherret
js-tokens 9.0: A Tiny JavaScript Tokenizer — A regex-powered ‘almost spec-compliant’ JavaScript tokenizer.
Simon Lydell
A Sudoku Solver Implemented in the TypeScript Type System? — An appropriate use of the 🤯 emoji here, I think!
Roy Li
Save 30% on Your POST/CON Ticket — Time is running out to save 30% on POST/CON 24. Don’t miss out on Postman’s biggest user conference ever.
Postman sponsor
Forge 7.3 – Quickly scaffold an Electron project with full build pipeline.
eslint-plugin-check-file 2.7 – Enforce consistent file/folder naming.
React Native Boilerplate 4.1 – A starter template for RN apps.
React Uploady 1.8 – Components and hooks for file uploading.
d3-graphviz 5.3 – Graphviz DOT rendering and animated transitions.
📱 React Native Vision Camera 3.9 – Powerful camera control.
⏈ Peaks.js 3.3 – BBC-created audio waveform UI component.
AdminJS 7.6 – Automatic admin interface for Node apps.