Plus jQuery and Backbone see releases, a shakeup for npm's role in Node.js, and Rich Harris on Svelte 5. |

#​674 — February 8, 2024

Read on the Web

Together with  Postman logo

JavaScript Weekly

jQuery 4.0.0 Beta — I recently looked at issue #1 of JavaScript Weekly and the top two items were jQuery, so it’s nice to feature it :-) You might not be using jQuery, but it's still everywhere, including WordPress. v4 says goodbye to IE 10 support, removes lots of deprecated APIs, and steps into the modern world just a tad (it even migrated to ESM).

jQuery Foundation

🎉 jQuery isn't the only blast from the past to get an update this week – Backbone.js 1.6 is out too! Let's party like it's 2014? (Also, 🐦 Vue.js has just turned ten years old!)

▶  Reimplementing GORILLAS.BAS in JavaScript — My first experience of publishing programming content was in the DOS QBasic era, so I have a soft spot for the Gorillas game that came with QBasic. Hunor has recorded a spectacular screencast on reimplementing it in JavaScript, but if you don't like videos, there’s a detailed written tutorial, too.

Hunor Márton Borbély

POST/CON 2024 Is Coming! April 30th-May 1st — Postman’s biggest API conference ever is coming, and early registration is now open! Hear from industry leaders and level up your skills in hands-on workshops with Postman experts. Register by February 13, 2024, to get a 50% discount on your ticket.

Postman sponsor

Node.js Developers Debate Enabling Corepack by Default and Potentially Unbundling npm — Node developers are wrestling with the decision to enable Corepack (a tool for managing package managers) by default, which has sparked a debate about the possibility of removing npm from the Node.js binary.

Sarah Gooding (Socket)

▶  How to Make A Great Framework Better? - Svelte 5 with Rich Harris — A sit-down interview with Rich Harris, creator of Svelte and SvelteKit. Dives into the philosophy, features, and future of Svelte, and covers how it aims to simplify web dev and make apps faster through its build time compilation approach. (78 minutes)

Prismic

🤔 If you haven't got time for the interview (above), enjoy Tenets, Rich's attempt to articulate Svelte's philosophy.

IN BRIEF:

RELEASES:

Save 50% on Your POST/CON Ticket — Gain new skills through hands-on workshops, in-depth presentations, and conversations at POST/CON 2024.

Postman sponsor

📒 Articles & Tutorials

Static Roots: Objects with Compile-Time Constant Addresses — The V8 blog never disappoints when it comes to deep, technical posts! Olivier Flückiger of the V8 team explains how fundamental, base objects like undefined and true are made more efficient and live in their own read-only heap. A brief look at the sort of thing that makes V8 fast!

Olivier Flückiger (V8)

From Many to One: Moving Our JavaScript Code Into a Monorepo — A story of trying to reduce complexity, by way of Nx, pnpm workspaces and, eventually, Turborepo. “It just works!”

José Guerrero (Aha!)

Intro to JavaScript Error and Performance Monitoring with Sentry — Track, trace, debug and resolve JavaScript errors across platforms. Are your releases that easy? Join us live.

Sentry sponsor

Creating an Animated 3D Starfield / 'Warp Speed' Effect — It’s always fun to get into some simple visual stuff like this every now and then. (This whole site is filled with interesting little tutorials, like this.)

Kirupa Chinnathambi

▶  A Deep Dive into htmx — Covers the fundamentals, digging into htmx’s codebase – plus it’s an unlisted video so you can feel like you’re in a secret club.

Carson Gross

Detecting Caps Lock from JavaScript
David Walsh

Just Enough CORS to Not Get Stuck
Abin Simon

🛠 Code & Tools

Tabulator: An Interactive Table and Data Grid Library — Supports all major browsers and can be used with Angular, Vue, and React if you wish. Been around for several years now, but continues to be maintained.

Oli Folkerd

🥽  React Native for Apple Vision Pro“Unlike compatibility mode, this approach allows immersive experiences and XR features on visionOS.” Now you just need to find $3500+ to buy the Vision Pro.. ;-)

Oskar Kwaśniewski (Callstack)

Open-Source JavaScript UI Components to Create Forms and Convert Them to PDF — Create and edit dynamic JSON-based forms with a self-hosted drag-and-drop form builder. Render them as editable PDFs directly in your browser.

SurveyJS sponsor

React Native TypeScript Boilerplate — Unsurprisingly, this is an all-in-one starter/boilerplate React Native app that uses TypeScript. It also includes a theming system, icons, Husky integration, and more, to help you get started fast.

FreakyCoder

Marked.js 12.0: Fast Markdown Parsing and Compiling — A low-level Markdown compiler built for speed and available as a client-side library, server-side library, or CLI. v12 brings it in line with recent CommonMark updates.

Christopher Jeffrey

Storybook 8 Beta — The latest update to the popular UI component workshop has improvements a-plenty including faster startup times, React Server Components support, as well as support for Vite 5 and Lit 3.

Michael Shilman (Storybook)

react-native-live-markdown: A Cross-Platform Markdown Editor — A drop-in replacement for React Native’s TextInput component but with Markdown formatting.

Expensify, Inc

Vue Currency Input: Currency Formatted Number Inputs for Vue.js — Based on Intl.NumberFormat and sitting atop the Vue Composition API, you can use this to decorate any input component with currency formatting capabilities.

Matthias Stiller

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