~javascriptweekly | Bookmarks (216)

Node Web Audio API 1.0: A Web Audio API Implementation for Node — More accurately, it’s a set of Node bindings for a Rust-powered non-browser implementation of the Web Audio API.

Bun v1.1.44: The Fast JS Runtime Adds On-Demand Frontend Bundling — The popular, high-performance alternative JavaScript runtime has extended its Bun.serve() HTTP handler with support for bundling frontend apps on demand using HTML imports.

Protect Against Bots, Fraud, and Abuse in Real Time — With WorkOS Radar you can detect, verify and block harmful behaviour, protecting your app with advanced device fingerprinting. Stop fake signups, stop free tier abuse, and stop bot attacks and brute force attempts today.

A Checklist for Your tsconfig.json — What I love about Dr. Axel is when he’s done the hard work of figuring something out for himself, he writes it down. So it goes here, with his journey to set up a good tsconfig.json for his projects.

A Look at Regular Expression Pattern Modifiers — You may be familiar with using flags to change the behavior of regexes, but Dr. Axel looks at a proposal bringing a way to change regex flags within subexpressions (e.g. /^[a-z](?-i:[a-z])$/i;). It’s at stage 4 and should land in ECMAScript 2025.

Accessibility Essentials Every React JS Developer Should Know — If you’re an experienced frontend developer, these might be second nature to you by now, but this is a good roundup of the entry level ‘table stakes’ for frontend accessibility, whether using React or not.

Write More Maintainable JavaScript with AI Code Reviews — CodeRabbit is your AI-powered code review companion that deeply understands the JavaScript codebase. Free for open source.

Five Years of React Native at Shopify — Five years ago, Shopify said React Native was the future for mobile development at their company and they meant it, with every mobile app moving to RN over time. Here’s what they learnt along the way and why they’re sticking with it.

Revealed: React's Experimental Animations API — <ViewTransition /> is based on the browser's View Transition API. It’s only in pre-release versions of React, but Matt is armed with examples for you to get a feel for the potential.

♟️ Chess.js: A Library to Manage a Chess Game — Provides move generation, validation, piece placement, check/checkmate/stalemate detection – "everything but the AI!" v1.0 offers a rewrite to TypeScript and a variety of enhancements.

react-nil 2.0: A React 'Null Renderer' — An interesting experiment to use React in situations where you don’t need it to render anything, but you want to use hooks, suspense, context, and other bits of the React lifecycle. Like in, say, a Node app. Maybe this CodeSandbox example will provoke some ideas.

🔎 file-type 20.0: Detect the File Type of a File, Stream or Data — For example, give it the raw data from a PNG file, and it’ll tell you it’s a PNG. Uses a ‘magic number’ approach so is targeted at non text-based formats. v20 adds support for yet more formats, including JARs, Word/Excel templates, and now supports ZIP decompression.

Learn Yjs and Building Realtime Collaborative Apps in JavaScript — Yjs is a CRDT (Conflict-free replicated data type) library for building collaborative and local-first apps. CDRTs are powerful but can be tricky to ‘get’ which is why this new interactive Yjs tutorial is so valuable. A great way to learn about building collaborative, syncing webapps from the ground up.

A Look at Import Attributes — It’s always a pleasure to see Dr. Axel blogging about JavaScript again, and he’s back with one of his typical deep dives into a newer ECMAScript feature: import attributes. This feature provides an inline syntax for attaching metadata to module imports such as for importing non-JavaScript modules (e.g. JSON, WASM or CSS).

How to Enable End-to-End Testing with Synthetic Monitoring — Synthetic Monitoring helps you launch new features with confidence and speed. Learn how you can create robust end-to-end test suites, spend less time on false positives, and proactively catch errors before they get to production.

Node’s New Built-in Support for TypeScript — Node.js v23.6.0 (Current) has just been released and makes Node’s new type-stripping features work by default, so you can just run node file.ts and it Should Just Work™. Dr. Axel explains how it works and what the limitations are.

The Future of htmx — htmx is an increasingly popular way to enhance HTML and actually write less JavaScript on the frontend. This post reflects on how htmx would like to be ‘the new jQuery’, not least in the sense that one of the project’s goals is to push the ideas of htmx into the HTML standard itself, as in this set of proposals.

You Don't Need Next.js — As much as Next.js is considered the React meta-framework of choice, if your requirements are modest, simply going with plain React offers numerous benefits in terms of simplicity and speed, as seen here.

Introducing @smoores/epub: A Package for Working with EPUB Files — EPUB is a popular e-book file format and this new library provides a way to both read and write them. npm package link.

Tipex: An Advanced Rich Text Editor for Svelte — Based on the popular Tiptap editor framework, it’s customizable, has theming support, and is Svelte 5-ready. Here’s a live example.

React-Toastify 11: In-Page Notifications Made Easy — There’s an elaborate demo page here but essentially it’s a flexible, easy to style ‘toast’ style notifications system with many years under its belt. GitHub repo.

Electrobun: A New JS Cross-Platform Desktop App Toolkit — A fresh take on the concept covered by Electron and Neutralinojs, except based around Bun. It’s early days, though, with only ARM-based Macs supported for now.

⭐ 2024's JavaScript Rising Stars — It’s time to fully wave goodbye to 2024, but not before Michael Rambeau’s annual analysis of which JavaScript projects fared best on GitHub over the past year. Even if you dislike GitHub stars as a metric for anything, this remains a great way to get a feel for the JavaScript ecosystem and see what libraries and tools have mindshare...