~nodeweekly | Issue 547 - Express.js 5.0 (8)

Express.js 5.0 Released; Sort Of — After a long period of seeming to merely be on life support, work on Express picked up significantly earlier this year with a big plan to push ‘Express forward.’ The first fruit of this process is now beginning to appear with v5.0. Node 18 is now the minimum support version, there are error handling improvements, improvements to the...

setImmediate() vs setTimeout() — setImmediate is considered deprecated in the browser space, but its different behavior still has a role to play in Node.

Set Up a $4/mo Hetzner VM to Skip the 'Serverless Tax'? — For many use cases, it can be cheaper and more convenient to spin up a cheap server than go serverless.

Integrating Slonik with Express.js — Slonik is a type-safe Node Postgres client that lets you build SQL queries in a composable way.

Jimp 1.6: Image Processing in Node without Native Dependencies — Most image libraries, such as the powerful Sharp, lean on external libraries to do the heavy lifting, but Jimp can handle BMPs, GIFs, JPEGs, PNGs, and TIFFs on its own for blurring, color adjustments, resizing, rotation, etc. GitHub repo.

jsdiff 7.0: A JavaScript Text Diffing Implementation — Can compare strings for differences in various ways including creating patches. There’s an online demo.

Rockpack 4.4: An Alternative React App Builder — Akin to Create React App, the goal is to get project setup time as low as possible, but Rockpack holds different opinions around how far to take things and packs in a lot of ideas including server side rendering, linting, and testing. GitHub repo.

node-html-to-image 5.0: Generate Images from HTML — Wraps around Puppeteer, but also lets you use Handlebars for added logic in your HTML.