~nodeweekly | Issue 543 - Looking through the Node toolbox (9)

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.

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.

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.