~nodeweekly | Bookmarks (177)

Node.js Doubles Security Releases with Newly Automated Process — The Node project has automated its security release process, doubling the number of releases, and is re-evaluating unsupported experimental features with the Next 10 group to enhance security.

Protobuf-ES 2.0 Now Generally Available — A fully compliant Protobuf implementation for JavaScript/TypeScript. Protobuf / protocol buffers is a Google-created language and platform neutral way to serialize structured data.

Volta 2.0: Install and Run JavaScript Tools Quickly — A long-standing Rust powered tool for installing and switching JavaScript related tools (like Node, TypeScript, Yarn, etc.) … “no matter the package manager, Node runtime, or OS.” GitHub repo.

Running Postgres inside Node-RED via WASM and PGlite — Node-RED is a popular Node.js-based ‘low code’ programming environment where you build ‘flows’ in the browser to connect code together.

Level Up Your Next.js Skills — Join Scott Moss for this detailed video course on intermediate Next.js. Learn how to build production-ready apps by diving into concepts such as server actions, data fetching, protected routes, form authentication, performance caching, and more.

Node.js Toolbox: A Way to Find and Compare Node.js Packages — A fantastic community maintained resource that presents a category-based way to find packages and libraries. For example, you can check out HTTP frameworks, browser testing, query builders, and more. You can compare libraries in various ways, see their download count, or edit/submit listings yourself.

The Node.js Best Practices List: 2024 Edition — An in-depth guide for Node developers that we link to most years. Divided into 8 sections and updated regularly, it digs into areas from error handling and code style to Docker and security practices.

Neon: Rust Bindings for Writing Node.js Modules — Or, as they put it: “Electrify Node.js with the power of Rust.” Neon makes it relatively easy to write code in the popular, high speed systems language and run it from Node, much like any other native extension. GitHub repo.

MongoDB In-Memory Server: Spins Up MongoDB Quickly for Testing — No emulation involved – this spins up a memory-only instance of a real MongoDB server temporarily in order to run integration tests in isolation.

JS-PyTorch: A PyTorch-Like Library for JavaScript — Recently renamed from JS-Torch, this brings some of the magic from Python’s popular PyTorch library to JavaScript for training and testing neural networks in particular. We linked to it earlier this year, but it has added GPU support thanks to GPU.js.

Neutralinojs 5.3: Alternative Cross-Platform Desktop App Approach — Neutralinojs offers an interesting lightweight alternative to something like Electron, as it still lets you build apps that run on Linux, Windows and macOS, but Chromium isn’t bundled – instead the existing installed browser engine is used.

easy-template-x: Generate .docx/Word Documents from Templates — Given a template document with Mustache-esque tags, this can switch in different content in a 'mail merge' style.

Tedious 18.4: A TDS Module for Connecting to SQL Server — Pure JS implementation of the TDS protocol that’s used to interact with instances of Microsoft’s SQL Server.

Node v20.16.0 (LTS) Released — If the recent bugs in the ‘Latest’ release branch have put you off, the trusty LTS releases are for you. A small-ish release, but Node 20 gains process.getBuiltinModule and Blob#bytes.

Debugging Your Node.js Project with Sentry — Using a demo Node.js app, learn the basics of monitoring and debugging any Node.js project with Sentry. Watch the step-by-step workshop on-demand.

Announcing TypeScript 5.6 Beta — The first beta of the next major version of TypeScript is out. Region-prioritized diagnostics (VS Code only, for now) is a particularly interesting addition.

PythonMonkey: Embed a JavaScript Engine into the Python VM — If you need to use Python but also want to run JS, this gives you a way to do it with Mozilla’s SpiderMonkey engine. It’s not V8 or Node based, but supports the Node.js and NPM-compatible CommonJS module system.

WarpStream: An 80% Cheaper Drop-In Kafka Replacement — Kafka without the hassle. No inter-AZ networking costs. Completely stateless. No disks to manage. Infinitely scalable.

node-fluent-ffmpeg: A Fluent API for Invoking FFmpeg — Abstracts the complex command-line usage of the popular FFmpeg media transcoder into a fluent Node API.

Handbrake-JS 7.1: Control Video Encoding and Transcoding from Node — Sticking to the theme of media transcoding, this is an interface to the popular, open source Handbrake video transcoding tool.

Benchmarking AWS Lambda Cold Starts Across JavaScript Runtimes — It’s from the Deno team so it may not surprise you that Deno was found to be fastest, but they share their methodology and results for Deno, Node, Bun and AWS’s managed Node runtime and, frankly, Node mostly did very well too.

Node.js Adds Experimental Support for TypeScript — In this pull request, Node merged an experimental ability to transpile TypeScript into JavaScript, ultimately letting Node directly ‘run TypeScript’. However, no type checking is performed and, as Matt Pocock explains, experimental and TypeScript-only features are a no-no. Perhaps think of it as less ‘running TypeScript’ and more ‘able to tolerate most of TypeScript’?

How to Create Dockerfiles with Generative AI — The folks at Docker look at the potential for using ChatGPT to create Dockerfiles for Node projects.