~nodeweekly | Bookmarks (177)

Announcing TypeScript 5.7 Beta — The newest TypeScript is on the way. As always, there's a laundry list of enhancements and features, but the path rewriting for relative paths is a particularly welcome addition for those building server-side apps, enabling easy rewrites of .ts imports into .js at compile time.

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

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.

Gitify: GitHub Notifications From Your Menu Bar — If you get too many GitHub notifications, this utility aims to ‘tame’ them by bringing the notifications to your menu bar on macOS, Windows and Linux. Built using Node and React as an Electron app. And, yes, it's open source.

JavaScript Minification Benchmarks — A frequently updated benchmark suite and results comparing the speed and quality of JavaScript minification across a variety of tools including esbuild, Babel, Bun, SWC, and Uglify.

Building AI Applications on Postgres? Start with pgai — pgai empowers developers with AI superpowers, enabling integration of AI workflows for tasks like embedding creation and model completion.

Superdiff 2.0: Compares Two Arrays or Objects and Return a Diff — Got two similar objects and want to see the underlying differences?

gradient-string 3.0: Beautiful Color Gradients in Terminal Output — What’s the next step up from colorizing the text output of your Node-powered CLI app? Gradients. v3.0 is rewritten in TypeScript and is a pure ES module.

🤖 node-llama-cpp v3: Run LLMs Locally with Llama from Node — One option for running LLMs locally is to spin up Ollama and speak with it over HTTP, but this makes everything possible with a simple npm package, including within Electron apps. “Say goodbye to setup headaches,” they claim.

Cacheable: A Suite of Caching Packages — A popular dependency that provides a simple, generic caching module, as well as a way to wrap native HTTP requests with RFC compliant cache support.

exiftool-vendored 28.3: Fast, Cross-Platform Node.js Access to ExifTool — Use this when you want to access embedded EXIF data within image files (particularly those taken with phones or DSLRs).

Simple Git 3.27: Run git Commands in Node Apps — Not a git reimplementation but an interface/abstraction for using the standard Git client from Node code.

µExpress / Ultimate Express: Like Express, But Faster? — It’s not Express, but a reimplementation of Express’s functionality with API compatibility. Based on µWebSockets, and with an optimized router, it boasts faster performance than regular Express, but needs some C++ magic to make it happen.

Jiti 2.0: Runtime TypeScript and ESM Support for Node.js — Long before Node got round to natively adding ES modules support or type stripping, Jiti brought the ability to quickly run TypeScript with native ESM support to Node, and it’s still going. v2.0 adds JSX/TSX import support, the ability to use Jiti via Node’s global hooks, and more.

Building Standalone Executables with Node.js — While the developer experience isn’t quite as nice as with Deno or Bun yet, Node does have experimental support for building single executables of apps that you can distribute to systems which don’t have Node installed.

Deno 2.0 Release Candidate — Deno started life as a manifestation of ideas that Node’s original creator, Ryan Dahl, had after his experiences with Node. Deno 2 is the next step: how the Deno team thinks Deno should ultimately be. Many changes await: window is gone and Node’s process appears, dependency management has been improved, numerous APIs have gone stable (e.g. WebGPU), and both...

libpg-query-node: Postgres' SQL Parser, Exposed for Node — Use Postgres’s SQL parser at a low level from Node via libpg_query. If you want something higher level, this library is used by pgsql-parser which gives the ability to parse and serialize queries into/from ASTs.

Piscina 4.7: Node.js Worker Pool Library — Efficiently run CPU-intensive tasks in parallel using worker threads in a controlled manner. GitHub repo.

A Comprehensive Guide to Node.js Addons — If you’d rather stick with Node than use Bun’s newest feature to bring C/C++ etc. into JavaScript, writing your own addon remains a dependable approach.

What's New in Express.js 5.0 — We mentioned Express 5.0 and some of its new features recently, but here's a deeper look at what it has to offer. The updates are largely incremental, but set the stage for Express’s future. A few breaking changes necessitate the major version bump.

Node v22.9.0 (Current) Released — The latest cutting edge Node has a new API for retrieving the stack trace of the current execution. It also disables V8’s Maglev optimizing JIT due to upstream reliability problems and the necessity for Node v22 to stick with V8 v12.4 when it goes LTS next month.

The Nine Node Pillars: Principles for Doing Node Right in the Enterprise — An interesting resource from a group of prolific and productive Node.js contributors. It’s designed to act as a checklist to identify gaps in your current Node development practices, particularly when building larger scale apps.