~javascriptweekly | Issue 718 - The projects that shaped JavaScript in 2024 (16)

⭐ 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...

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 Clerk SDKs for Vue and Nuxt — Official @clerk/vue & @clerk/nuxt SDKs for authentication integration with pre-built UI components in Vue/Nuxt apps.

Using TypeScript Without Build Tools — Chris Coyier enjoys the benefits of TypeScript while developing, but actually compiling it to JavaScript in various scenarios is less endearing. We’ve learnt (above) that Node can now run .ts files directly, but what other projects support the use of TypeScript without build tools?

PostalMime: A Universal Email Parsing Library — An email parsing library happy in most JS runtimes. Takes the raw source of emails and parses them into their constituent parts.

trimMiddle(): The Missing String Trim Method? — If you’ve got a long string and want to keep the start and end and truncate in the middle, this is for you. There’s a live demo here and GitHub repo.

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.

Tagify 4.33: An Elegant Input Component for Tags — The polished demos show a lot of effort has been put in here. GitHub repo.