programming Archives - Online Code Generator

jQuery lives on; major changes teased

Posted on May 18, 2023May 21, 2023 by Mark FeehilyComments Off

#639 — May 18, 2023

JavaScript Weekly

Bun’s New Bundler: 220x Faster than webpack? — Bun is one of the newest JavaScript runtimes (built atop the JavaScriptCore engine) and focuses on speed while aiming to be a drop-in replacement for Node.js. This week’s v0.6.0 release is the ‘biggest release yet’ with standalone executable generation and more, but its new JavaScript bundler and minifier may attract most of the attention and this post digs into why.

Jarred Sumner

???? If you’d prefer to read what a third party thinks, Shane O’Sullivan gave the new bundler a spin and shared his thoughts. There’s also some discussion on Hacker News. It’s early days and while esbuild may be fast enough for most right now, it’s fantastic to see any progress in bundling.

Deopt Explorer: A VS Code Extension to Inspect V8 Trace Log Info — A thorough introduction to MS’s new tool for performing analysis of the V8 engine’s internals, including CPU profile data, how inline caches operate, deoptimizations, how functions were run (interpreted or compiled) and more. There’s a lot going on.

Ron Buckton (Microsoft)

Supercharge Your Websites and Applications with Cloudflare — Get ready for supercharged speed and reliability with Cloudflare’s suite of performance tools. With ultra-fast CDN, smart traffic routing, media optimization, and more, Cloudflare has everything you need to ensure your site or app runs at peak performance.

Cloudflare sponsor

jQuery 3.7.0 Released — JavaScript Weekly is 638 issues old, or almost 13 years once you take away weeks off, so jQuery was a big deal in our early days. We hold a lot of nostalgia for it, and it remains widely used even if no-one is writing about it anymore ???? v3.7 folds the Sizzle selector engine into the core, adds some unitless CSS properties, gains a new uniqueSort method, and “major changes” are still promised in future. jQuery lives on!

Timmy Willison (jQuery Foundation)

⚡️ IN BRIEF:

TC39’s Hemanth.HM has begun keeping a list of ES2023 code examples like he did for ES2022, ES2021, and ES2020.

???? The New Stack has a story about Meta supporting the OpenJS Foundation – but who wrote the article is what we found more interesting..

The folks at Meta / Facebook have written about the efficiency gains made in Messenger Desktop by moving from Electron to React Native.

One downside to platforms like Cloudflare Workers using V8 isolates has been a lack of support for opening TCP sockets – quite an impediement if you want to talk to a RDBMS over TCP or something. Fear no more, Cloudflare Workers has introduced a connect() API for creating TCP sockets from Workers functions.

Promise.withResolvers progressed to stage 2 at the latest TC39 meeting.

RELEASES:

Node.js 20.2

Rome 12.1
↳ The formatter/linter gains stage 3 decorator support.

Ember.js 5.0 – App framework.

Jasmine 5.0 – Testing framework.

Gatsby 5.10

???? Articles & Tutorials

How to Get Full Type Support with Plain JavaScript — It’s possible to reap the benefits of TypeScript, yet still write plain JavaScript, as TypeScript’s analyzer understands types written in the JSDoc format.

Pausly

TypeScript’s own JS Projects Utilizing TypeScript page has more info on the different levels of strictness you can follow from mere inference on regular JS code through to full on TypeScript with strict enabled.

▶ Coding a Working Game of Chess in Pure JavaScript — No canvas, either. All using the DOM, SVG, and JavaScript. No AI and it’s not perfect, but it’s only 88 minutes long and it’ll give you something to work on..

Ania Kubow

Automate Slack and MS Teams Notifications Using Node.js — Quick guide to send and automate messages via Slack, MS Teams, and any other channel from your Node.js applications.

Courier.com sponsor

Your Jest Tests Might Be Wrong — Is your Jest test suite failing you? You might not be using the testing framework’s full potential, especially when it comes to preventing state leakage between tests.

Jamie Magee

A Guide to Visual Regression Testing with Playwright — The Playwright browser control library can form the basis of an end-to-end testing mechanism all written in JavaScript, and comparing the visual output of tests can help show where things are going wrong.

Dima Ivashchuk (Lost Pixel)

Create a Real Time Multi Host Video Chat in a Browser with Amazon IVS

Amazon Web Services (AWS) sponsor

React Server Components, Next.js App Router and Examples — Addy Osmani’s overview of of the state of React Server Components, the Next.js App Router implementation, other implementations, the move towards hybrid rendering, plus related links.

Addy Osmani

..and if React is your thing, the latest issue of React Status is for you.

???? Code & Tools

VanJS: A 1.2KB Reactive UI Framework Without JSX — A new entrant to an increasingly crowded space, VanJS is particularly light and elegant, and its author has put some serious effort into documenting it and offering tools to convert your HTML to its custom format. It’s short for vanilla JavaScript, by the way.. GitHub repo.

Tao Xin

JavaScript Scratchpad for VS Code (2m+ Downloads) — Quokka.js is the #1 tool for exploring/testing JavaScript with edit-continue experience to see realtime execution and runtime values.

Wallaby.js sponsor

Introducing Legend-State 1.0: Faster State for React — Another state management solution? After a year of effort, Legend State 1.0 claims to be the fastest option “on just about every metric” and they have the benchmarks to prove it. Whatever the case, this thorough intro is worth a look. GitHub repo.

Moo․do

Starry Night: GitHub-Like Syntax Highlighting — Apparently, GitHub’s own syntax highlighting approach isn’t open source, but this takes a similar approach and is. It’s admittedly quite ‘heavy’ (due to using a WASM build of the Oniguruma regex engine) but that’s the price of quality.

Titus Wormer

Garph 0.5: A Fullstack GraphQL Framework for TypeScript — Full-stack ‘batteries included’ GraphQL APIs without codegen. GitHub repo.

Step CI

headless-qr: A Simple, Modern QR Code Library — A slimmer adaptation of an older project without the extra code that isn’t necessary today. Turning the binary into an image is your job, or use something like QRCode.js if you want a canvas-rendered QR code out of the box.

Rich Harris

Scroll Btween: Use Scroll Position to Tween CSS Values on DOM Elements — Scrolling/parallax libraries tend to feel the same but this one demonstrates some diverse examples with colors, images, and text — all with no dependencies.

Olivier Blanc

eslint-plugin-check-file: Rules for Consistent Filename and Folder Names — Allows you to enforce a consistent naming pattern for file and directory names in projects.

Huan

Transformers.js 2.0 – Run Hugging Face transformers directly in browser.

PrimeReact 9.4 – Extensive UI component library.

The Lounge 4.4 – Cross-platform, self-hosted web IRC client.

Faast.js 8.0 – Serverless batch computing made simple.

???? Jobs

Find JavaScript Jobs with Hired — Hired makes job hunting easy-instead of chasing recruiters, companies approach you with salary details up front. Create a free profile now.

Hired

Fullstack Engineer at Everfund.com — Push code, change lives! Help us become the center for good causes on the modern web with our dev tools.

Everfund

????‍???? Got a job listing to share? Here’s how.

???? Go with the flow..

js2flowchart.js — A visualization library to convert JavaScript code into attractive SVG flowcharts. Luckily, there’s a live online version if you want to play without having to install anything.

Bohdan Liashenko

S3 URI Parsing is now available in AWS SDK for Java 2.x

Posted on May 8, 2023May 21, 2023 by Mark FeehilyComments Off

The AWS SDK for Java team is pleased to announce the general availability of Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) URI parsing in the AWS SDK for Java 2.x. You can now parse path-style and virtual-hosted-style S3 URIs to easily retrieve the bucket, key, region, style, and query parameters. The new parseUri() API and S3Uri class provide the highly-requested parsing features that many customers miss from the AWS SDK for Java 1.x. Please note that Amazon S3 AccessPoints and Amazon S3 on Outposts URI parsing are not supported.

Motivation

Users often need to extract important components like bucket and key from stored S3 URIs to use in S3Client operations. The new parsing APIs allow users to conveniently do so, bypassing the need for manual parsing or storing the components separately.

Getting Started

To begin, first add the dependency for S3 to your project.

<dependency>
<groupId>software.amazon.awssdk</groupId>
<artifactId>s3</artifactId>
<version>${s3.version}</version>
</dependency>

Next, instantiate S3Client and S3Utilities objects.

S3Client s3Client = S3Client.create();
S3Utilities s3Utilities = s3Client.utilities();

Parsing an S3 URI

To parse your S3 URI, call parseUri() from S3Utilities, passing in the URI. This will return a parsed S3Uri object. If you have a String of the URI, you’ll need to convert it into an URI object first.

String url = “https://s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/myBucket/resources/doc.txt?versionId=abc123&partNumber=77&partNumber=88”;
URI uri = URI.create(url);
S3Uri s3Uri = s3Utilities.parseUri(uri);

With the S3Uri, you can call the appropriate getter methods to retrieve the bucket, key, region, style, and query parameters. If the bucket, key, or region is not specified in the URI, an empty Optional will be returned. If query parameters are not specified in the URI, an empty map will be returned. If the field is encoded in the URI, it will be returned decoded.

Region region = s3Uri.region().orElse(null); // Region.US_WEST_1
String bucket = s3Uri.bucket().orElse(null); // “myBucket”
String key = s3Uri.key().orElse(null); // “resources/doc.txt”
boolean isPathStyle = s3Uri.isPathStyle(); // true

Retrieving query parameters

There are several APIs for retrieving the query parameters. You can return a Map<String, List<String>> of the query parameters. Alternatively, you can specify a query parameter to return the first value for the given query, or return the list of values for the given query.

Map<String, List<String>> queryParams = s3Uri.rawQueryParameters(); // {versionId=[“abc123”], partNumber=[“77”, “88”]}
String versionId = s3Uri.firstMatchingRawQueryParameter(“versionId”).orElse(null); // “abc123”
String partNumber = s3Uri.firstMatchingRawQueryParameter(“partNumber”).orElse(null); // “77”
List<String> partNumbers = s3Uri.firstMatchingRawQueryParameters(“partNumber”); // [“77”, “88”]

Caveats

Special Characters

If you work with object keys or query parameters with reserved or unsafe characters, they must be URL-encoded, e.g., replace whitespace ” ” with “%20”.

Valid:
“https://s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/myBucket/object%20key?query=%5Bbrackets%5D”

Invalid:
“https://s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/myBucket/object key?query=[brackets]”

Virtual-hosted-style URIs

If you work with virtual-hosted-style URIs with bucket names that contain a dot, i.e., “.”, the dot must not be URL-encoded.

Valid:
“https://my.Bucket.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/key”

Invalid:
“https://my%2EBucket.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/key”

Conclusion

In this post, I discussed parsing S3 URIs in the AWS SDK for Java 2.x and provided code examples for retrieving the bucket, key, region, style, and query parameters. To learn more about how to set up and begin using the feature, visit our Developer Guide. If you are curious about how it is implemented, check out the source code on GitHub. As always, the AWS SDK for Java team welcomes bug reports, feature requests, and pull requests on the aws-sdk-java-v2 GitHub repository.

Oracle’s lawyers on JavaScript™

Posted on April 27, 2023May 21, 2023 by Mark FeehilyComments Off

#636 — April 27, 2023

Read on the Web

JavaScript™ Weekly

Babylon.js 6.0: The Powerful Web-Based 3D Framework — Babylon.js remains one of the world’s leading WebGL-based graphics engines with a visual scene builder and best-in-class physically-based rendering. v6.0 includes a new physics plugin with plenty of docs and demos, fluid rendering, major improvements to how reflections are handled, screen reader support, and more. This is a huge release of a significant project in the JavaScript ecosystem and we can’t do it justice here but there’s even more on the official homepage.

Babylon.js

Handsontable 12.3: What’s New in the Excel-Like Data Grid — Released recently, the popular data editor brings improved support for React 18 and large data sets. But that’s not all – the team behind Handsontable has shared some cool insights about it in a new article. Check it out to learn more.

Handsontable sponsor

???? Oracle’s Lawyers Stir Over JavaScript™ Trademark Use — Last year, we put out a call for anyone who knows Larry Ellison to pass on the word when Ryan Dahl asked Oracle to release the JavaScript trademark, but it appears little has changed with Oracle’s lawyers taking a dim view of a new British company called “Rust for JavaScript Developers Ltd.”

Sid Chatterjee on Twitter

IN BRIEF:

???? Apparently Nintendo even uses JavaScript. A developer discovered that 2015’s Mario vs. Donkey Kong: Tipping Stars for the Wii U and 3DS was written with HTML and JavaScript under the hood and managed to build a shim to get it running in a normal browser.

Chrome 113’s DevTools will allow you to override network response headers, including CORS headers. It also offers Nuxt, Vite, and Rollup debugging improvements.

???? “Switching to rspack from webpack+babel has reduced our build times by 85%.”

We covered Node.js 20’s release last week, but if you want to dig deeper into the new (experimental) permissions model, here are the full docs.

In a recent bug report on the React repo Dan Abramov noted that if you use Preact Signals with React, you forfeit any guarantee that React will work correctly and that “if React was a piece of hardware, this is exactly the kind of thing that voids the warranty.”

RELEASES:

Ink 4.2
↳ Build CLI apps React-style.

Rspack 0.1.9
↳ Fast Rust-based web bundler.

create-svelte 4.0
↳ CLI for creating SvelteKit projects.

???? Articles & Tutorials

Exploring the Potential of Web Workers for Multithreading on the Web — Looks at the importance of Web Workers for multithreading in the browser, including the limitations and considerations of using them and the strategies for mitigating potential issues associated with them.

Sarah Oke Okolo

???? Partytown is worth considering if you’d like to run potentially resource intensive third-party scripts in Web Workers.

Dissecting npm Malware: Five Packages and Their ‘Evil’ Install Scripts — npm related security continues to be a big topic and a common security vector is the install script that’s run when you install a package.

Gabi Dobocan (Sandworm)

Automate Visual Tests with Chromatic—Powered by Storybook — Verify visual changes and component logic on each commit. Get started with a $500 credit using code JSWEEKLY.

Chromatic sponsor

Use Fuse.js for Quick and Easy Fuzzy Searching — Fuse.js is a zero-dependency fuzzy search library you can use to offer search features in the browser without a dedicated search-oriented backend.

Doug Shipp

Modern Alternatives to Create React App — create-react-app was the ‘go to’ for building single-page React apps, but this article touches on the wide variety of alternatives now in common use. (We’re on team Vite!)

Ayooluwa Aduwo

▶ Hot Takes on the Web — The creator of Svelte shares his thoughts on various frontend trends.

Rich Harris

How to Display a View Counter on Your Blog with React Server Components

Sebastien Castiel

???? Code & Tools

Vuetify 3.2: A Material Design Framework for Vue.js — If you’re building a Vue.js app and would rather hand off the main design decisions to someone else, yet still have a beautifully designed app, this is the component framework for you. GitHub repo.

Vuetify Team

“Super stoked for all the features coming out in v3.2 today but the one that stands out most is the global defaults improvements. It makes virtual components super powerful.”

___
John Leider, creator of Vuetify

TestGPT | Generating Meaningful Tests for Busy Devs — Get non-trivial tests suggested right inside your IDE, so you can code smart, and stay confident when you push.

CodiumAI sponsor

Memize 2.0: Unabashedly-Barebones Memoization Library — The goal here is speed, and it claims to be the fastest option. It clocks in at just 0.3KB minified, too – unsurprising, since the implementation is very straightforward.

Andrew Duthie

w2ui 2.0: A Framework Agnostic UI Library — Somehow we’d never encountered this before, but w2ui is a interesting, compact suite of common components including a grid, toolbar, tabs, and sidebar, that work with vanilla JS projects or those built with Angular, React, etc. Demos here.

Vitali Malinouski

Alfaaz: The Fastest Multilingual Word Counter — We’ll take their.. word for it ???? but at almost 1 gigabyte per second and support for CJK texts and Arabic and Urdu alphabets, there’s a lot on offer here.

Abdullah Atta

Satori: Convert HTML and CSS to SVG — Designed to be used with React and JSX. It doesn’t support all HTML but is designed to provide a familiar way to generate images from code.

Vercel

Add a Full-Featured Notification Center to Your App in Minutes

Courier sponsor

Linker.js: Access C, C++, Rust and Go Libraries from Node.js — A dynamic C-shared library linker that provides an interface for accessing any C-shared libraries (which all of C, C++, Rust and Go can produce). Linux only for now.

Bitair

Editable: An Extensible Rich Text Editor Framework — Currently depends on React, with future plans for a plain JavaScript version. Its primary feature is that it avoids using the contenteditable attribute for better interoperability. Try it in this playground.

Editable

???? Jobs

Find JavaScript Jobs with Hired — Hired makes job hunting easy-instead of chasing recruiters, companies approach you with salary details up front. Create a free profile now.

Hired

????‍???? Got a job listing to share? Here’s how.

JavaScript on your schedule

Posted on April 6, 2023May 21, 2023 by Mark FeehilyComments Off

#633 — April 6, 2023

Read on the Web

❓ JavaScript Weekly on a Thursday? It’s true. As well as it being Good Friday tomorrow, we’ve decided to move to Thursday permanently going forward. We hope you have a good Easter, if you celebrate it, otherwise enjoy one fewer email on Fridays ????
__
Your editor, Peter Cooper

JavaScript Weekly

Croner: Cron for JavaScript and TypeScript — Trigger functions upon the schedule of your choice using the classic cron syntax. Works in Node, Deno, Bun and the browser, across time zones, offers error handling and overrun protection, and more. There’s an interesting live demo on JSFiddle.

Hexagon

▶️ JSON vs XML with Douglas Crockford — The author of 2008’s hugely popular JavaScript: The Good Parts went on a podcast to share the story of JSON, his discovery of JavaScript’s ‘good parts’, and his general approach to building software, including his dislike of JavaScript ‘frameworks.’ There’s a transcript if you’re not keen on listening. (50 minutes.)

CoRecursive Podcast podcast

Headless CMS with World-Class TypeScript Support — Kontent.ai is the leading platform for modular content. Streamline your code using TypeScript SDK, CLI, Rich text resolver, and strongly typed model generator. Scale with no problems when your project grows. Have you seen our UI?

Kontent.ai sponsor

The Angular Signals RFC — There’s a lot of excitement about a shift in Angular involving the addition of signals as a reactive primitive – the official RFC is now available for this feature, and you’re encouraged to leave comments. If you’d rather see a practical use for signals, Joshua Morony recorded ▶️ a screencast showing them off.

Angular Team

Over 100 Algorithms and Data Structures Demonstrated in JS — Examples of many common algorithms (e.g. bit manipulation, Pascal’s triangle, Hamming distance) and data structures (e.g. linked lists, tries, graphs) with explanations.

Oleksii Trekhleb et al.

IN BRIEF:

Laurie Voss looks at the most popular frameworks used in sites deployed to Netlify. React-based options lead the way.

Oliver Dunk of the Chrome Extensions Team has posted an update on the Manifest V2 to Manifest V3 transition – it’s taking longer than expected so Manifest V2 isn’t disappearing any time soon.

V8 v11.2 is shipping with support for WebAssembly tail calls.

With Chrome 113, Chrome is now shipping support for WebGPU.

A look at how Microsoft’s Blazor (a stack aimed at building front-end apps with C#) is skirting around JavaScript with its focus on WebAssembly.

JSDayIE 2023: The First JavaScript Conference in Ireland Is Back! — Join us on September 26th in Dublin to experience everything the Irish JavaScript community and Ireland have to offer.

JSDayIE sponsor

RELEASES:

Electron 24.0 – Complete with Chromium 112, V8 11.2, and Node 18.14.

Storybook 7.0 – Though still tagged ‘next’ and pending a proper launch.

Storybook for React Native 6.5

WebStorm 2023.1 – Commercial JS IDE from JetBrains.

Rete.js 2.0 Beta – Framework for building node-based editors.

???? Articles & Tutorials

Making a Big, Slow Vue/Alpine Page ‘Blazingly’ Fast — A practical example of a pattern the author is billing a “reactive switchboard.” “I’m going to use Vue/Alpine lingo in this article, but I think this pattern applies to lots of different tools.”

Caleb Porzio

▶ Watch Dan Abramov Explore React Server Components — At an epic (though well timestamped) four hours, this isn’t a quick watch, but Dan and Ben Holmes walk through everything React Server Components oriented, complete with diagrams, code, and a real-world app.

Ben Holmes

Getting PWAs in App Stores with PWABuilder — Thomas Steiner demonstrates how PWABuilder makes it possible to submit Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) to app stores like those provided by Google, Apple, and Microsoft.

Thomas Steiner (Google)

Add a Full-Featured Notification Center to Your App in Minutes

Courier.com sponsor

What Are Source Maps? — Learn how source maps can help you debug your original code instead of what was actually deployed after the build process.

Sofia Emelianova (Chrome Developers)

How I Used ChatGPT in My JavaScript Projects

James Q Quick

???? Code & Tools

Relaunching JSPM CLI for Import Map Package Management — Several years ago when JS had numerous competing module formats, JSPM was a useful package manager atop SystemJS, but now it’s being relaunched as an import map package management tool.

Guy Bedford

Chrome Extension CLI 1.4: CLI for Building Chrome Extensions — Want to get building an extension for Chrome as quickly as possible? This Node-powered tool aims to get you on the right path ASAP. v1.4 adds a script to generate a ZIP file (also known as a ‘postcode file’ at Microsoft UK? ????) of the extension.

Dutiyesh Salunkhe

React Chrono 2: A Flexible Timeline Component — A complete overhaul of a popular component. You can render themeable timelines in vertical, horizontal, or vertical alternating orientations. It includes keyboard navigation support, auto advancement, and, as of v2, support for nested timelines.

Prabhu Murthy

Dynaboard: A Visual Web App IDE Made for Developers — Build high performance public and private web applications in a collaborative — full-stack — development environment.

Dynaboard sponsor

Jampack: A Post-Processing Tool to Optimize Static Websites — Similar to a bundler or build tool, with features like image optimization, asset compression, and some code auto-fixes — all amounting to strong Core Web Vitals scores.

divRIOTS

imask.js 6.5.0: A Vanilla JavaScript Input Mask — Prevent users from entering invalid values. Has plugins for Vue, Angular, React, Svelte, and Solid, if needed.

imaskjs

tween.js 19.0
↳ JS tweening engine for easy animations.

Swiper 9.2
↳ Modern mobile-friendly touch slider.

gridstack.js 7.3
↳ Dashboard layout and creation framework.

ReacType 15.0
↳ Visual prototyping tool that can export React apps.

xstyled 3.8
↳ Utility-first CSS-in-JS framework for React.

Spacetime 7.4.2
↳ Lightweight timezone library.

???? Jobs

Find JavaScript Jobs with Hired — Hired makes job hunting easy-instead of chasing recruiters, companies approach you with salary details up front. Create a free profile now.

Hired

Full Stack JavaScript Engineer @ Emerging Cybersecurity Startup — Small team/big results. Fun + flexible + always interesting. Come build our award-winning, all-in-one cybersecurity platform.

Defendify

????‍???? Got a job listing to share? Here’s how.

???? Wise Words of the Week

A reminder from Vue.js’s Evan You that we live in a vast and varied world, including in the JavaScript ecosystem:

Why Do Some Programmers Say Frontend Is Easier Than Backend?

Posted on February 24, 2023May 21, 2023 by Mark FeehilyComments Off

So, you’re wondering if frontend development is easier than backend development. Truth be told, the question is rather challenging. Frontend and backend development are two somewhat complicated aspects of web development in 2023. Fortunately for you, we’ll determine which type of development is more challenging in this article: frontend or backend!

Do you ever wonder why so many backend developers say that frontend is easier? Discover the answer to this and many other related questions in this article! Have you ever asked yourself questions like What makes frontend easier than backend? What skills are needed to become a successful frontend developer? or What techniques do developers use to make the frontend development process easier?

It is well known that backend development is more difficult than frontend development. A study by the University of Oxford found that “Backend developers tend to have a higher workload than frontend developers, due to the complexity of the programming language used”. The same study also noted that “The complexity of the backend language also means that backend developers need to have a higher level of technical knowledge than frontend developers”.

In this article, you will learn why so many backend developers say that frontend is easier, what skills are needed to become a successful frontend developer, and what techniques are used to make the frontend development process easier. After reading this article, you will have a better understanding of why frontend is easier than backend and why it is important to learn both.

Is Frontend Development Easier Than Backend?

During the past decade, frontend development has grown in popularity as more engineers switch from backend development to frontend. Due to its greater availability and perception as being “easier” than backend development, frontend programming has the propensity to be used more frequently. The primary reason so many developers like the frontend are its simplicity. Frontend development has a lower learning curve and calls for less technical knowledge than backend programming. This makes it possible for developers to get started straight away even with just a basic understanding of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

Moreover, several frontend frameworks, such as React and Vue, have made it simpler for developers to create working prototypes of websites fast. The tools available are another reason frontend development is perceived as being simpler. Website development is made simpler for developers by the abundance of tools, libraries, and frameworks available. As an illustration, CSS preprocessors like Sass and LESS may significantly cut down on the time required to develop and maintain CSS code. The same is true for JavaScript build tools like webpack and gulp, which may assist developers in writing task automation and optimized code.

The fact that frontend development is more visible and tangible than backend development is a last consideration. As a result, developers can more easily comprehend and interact with the code they write since they can view the results of their labors in real-time in the browser. Developers may be highly motivated by this and debugging and troubleshooting are also much facilitated. In conclusion, many backend engineers assert that the frontend is simpler since it is more approachable, has access to tools, and is more visible and concrete. Because of this, a lot of developers are switching from the backend to the frontend, and this trend is probably going to continue.

What is Frontend & Backend Development?

Frontend development (client-side development) refers to the development of the parts of a website that the user can see and interact with. This includes code that is responsible for the look, feel, and behavior of the website and includes HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

Backend development (server-side development) is the creation of sections of a website that the user does not directly view or interact with. This contains program code for databases, servers, and APIs that manage and handle the website’s data.

What’s the Difference?

The main distinction between frontend and backend development is that the former concentrates on the external components of the website, whilst the latter does so for its internal components. Backend development is in charge of data processing and storage, whereas frontend development is in charge of the appearance, feel, and functionality of the website.

Frontend developers build the aesthetics, style, and interaction of the user interface using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. The logic, databases, and APIs that power the user interface are created by backend developers in languages like PHP, Python, Java, and Ruby. Backend development is concerned with how the user interface works and interacts with the server-side logic and data, whereas frontend development is concerned with how the user interface appears and feels.

Why Is Frontend Harder Than Backend?

Why is it that some claim that frontend development is more difficult than backend development these days? There are several reasons why this is so, let’s look at them.

Keeping up with a rapidly changing environment

The rapid advancements in frontend development have given it a reputation for being challenging. Every few months, new frameworks and technologies like React, Angular, and Vue are released to improve development. These continual updates mean that staying up-to-date requires constant learning of new lessons and courses. Once Angular was the most popular frontend framework, but now React is the preferred choice for many companies. Even Netflix has gone back to using the original JavaScript due to performance concerns. With no indication that these advances will soon slow down, it’s important to remember how quickly the industry is developing the next time someone claims that frontend development is easy.

More information to consider

Frontend development may prove to be equally challenging in 2023 as backend development. With opinionated frameworks, state management systems, and intricate logic, there should be no assumption that the workload for backend developers is greater than that of frontend developers. However, frontend development entails more than just programming, as it demands creativity, aesthetics, and an understanding of user experience. This includes being adept with design techniques, creating prototypes, and making sure the design looks professional. Furthermore, it necessitates taking into account how users will interact with the software to deliver the best user experience.

More tools to learn

As the workplace evolves, so too must your skillset. Keeping up with the latest tools, such as Webpack, React, Yarn, and NPM can be a challenge, as you may find yourself constantly learning new technologies, leaving less time to learn other programming topics, such as different paradigms, languages, and best practices. Nevertheless, it is important to remain up-to-date and not be discouraged by the ever-changing landscape.

Test suites and testing

Testing the frontend of a web application is more difficult and tedious than the back end. In addition to checking for the theoretical soundness of functions and objects, and assessing edge scenarios, frontend testing requires tests for design components, logical operations, and state changes. As such, manual testing is often preferred over creating a unit test suite, which is more time-consuming and frustrating. All in all, frontend testing is more complex, laborious, and frustrating than backend testing.

Why Is Backend Harder Than Frontend?

Both backend and frontend development have specific explanations for why they are more difficult.

The higher learning curve for beginners

Compared to frontend development, learning backend programming can be more difficult. To build a website’s frontend, only HTML and CSS are needed. However, the backend requires a deep understanding of programming languages. This can be daunting for newcomers and lead them to believe that frontend development is easier. In reality, the learning curve for the backend is much steeper than for the frontend.

Frontend is less visually appealing than the backend

Just knowing where to look can help you find the backend, which can be just as aesthetically pleasing as the frontend. However, with frontend development, you can often see the effects of your changes in real time. The response time for the backend can be unpredictable, making it more challenging for a beginner.

Many backend languages

The complexity of learning backend languages can be attributed to their variety and the need to comprehend multiple languages. While frontend development only requires knowledge of JavaScript, HTML, and CSS, backend development involves mastering three languages to work with the various methods available. Although the concepts are generally the same, transitioning between languages can be challenging, leading many to stick with the language they are most comfortable with or switch only when necessary for a better career opportunity.

Summary

So, which is harder, the backend or the frontend? The truth is that both types of development are equally difficult, but for different reasons. Frontend development necessitates comprehension of design concepts and user experience, as well as the ability to produce an aesthetically beautiful user interface. Awareness of server architecture, security, and strong technical language and framework knowledge are all necessary for backend development. In the end, both styles of development are essential for a successful product, and they each call for a unique set of talents. The distinctions between the two and the many tasks that each may be utilized for must be understood. You can more readily pick which form of growth is best for you if you are aware of the distinctions.

The post Why Do Some Programmers Say Frontend Is Easier Than Backend? appeared first on Flatlogic Blog.

Maintaining Code Quality with Amazon CodeCatalyst Reports

Posted on February 22, 2023May 21, 2023 by Mark FeehilyComments Off

Amazon CodeCatalyst reports contain details about tests that occur during a workflow run. You can create tests such as unit tests, integration tests, configuration tests, and functional tests. You can use a test report to help troubleshoot a problem during a workflow.

Introduction

In prior posts in this series, I discussed reading The Unicorn Project, by Gene Kim, and how the main character, Maxine, struggles with a complicated Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC) after joining a new team. One of the challenges she encounters is the difficulties in shipping secure, functioning code without an automated testing mechanism. To quote Gene Kim, “Without automated testing, the more code we write, the more money it takes for us to test.”

Software Developers know that shipping vulnerable or non-functioning code to a production environment is to be avoided at all costs; the monetary impact is high and the toll it takes on team morale can be even greater. During the SDLC, developers need a way to easily identify and troubleshoot errors in their code.

In this post, I will focus on how developers can seamlessly run tests as a part of workflow actions as well as configure unit test and code coverage reports with Amazon CodeCatalyst. I will also outline how developers can access these reports to gain insights into their code quality.

Prerequisites

If you would like to follow along with this walkthrough, you will need to:

Have an AWS Builder ID for signing in to CodeCatalyst.
Belong to a CodeCatalyst space and have the Space administrator role assigned to you in that space. For more information, see Creating a space in CodeCatalyst, Managing members of your space, and Space administrator role.
Have an AWS account associated with your space and have the IAM role in that account. For more information about the role and role policy, see Creating a CodeCatalyst service role.

Walkthrough

As with the previous posts in the CodeCatalyst series, I am going to use the Modern Three-tier Web Application blueprint. Blueprints provide sample code and CI/CD workflows to help you get started easily across different combinations of programming languages and architectures. To follow along, you can re-use a project you created previously, or you can refer to a previous post that walks through creating a project using the Three-tier blueprint.

Once the project is deployed, CodeCatalyst opens the project overview. This view shows the content of the README file from the project’s source repository, workflow runs, pull requests, etc. The source repository and workflow are created for me by the project blueprint. To view the source code, I select Code → Source Repositories from the left-hand navigation bar. Then, I select the repository name link from the list of source repositories.

Figure 1. List of source repositories including Mythical Mysfits source code.

From here I can view details such as the number of branches, workflows, commits, pull requests and source code of this repo. In this walkthrough, I’m focused on the testing capabilities of CodeCatalyst. The project already includes unit tests that were created by the blueprint so I will start there.

From the Files list, navigate to web → src → components→ __tests__ → TheGrid.spec.js. This file contains the front-end unit tests which simply check if the strings “Good”, “Neutral”, “Evil” and “Lawful”, “Neutral”, “Chaotic” have rendered on the web page. Take a moment to examine the code. I will use these tests throughout the walkthrough.

Figure 2. Unit test for the front-end that test strings have been rendered properly.

Next, I navigate to the workflow that executes the unit tests. From the left-hand navigation bar, select CI/CD → Workflows. Then, find ApplicationDeploymentPipeline, expand Recent runs and select Run-xxxxx . The Visual tab shows a graphical representation of the underlying YAML file that makes up this workflow. It also provides details on what started the workflow run, when it started, how long it took to complete, the source repository and whether it succeeded.

Figure 3. The Deployment workflow open in the visual designer.

Workflows are comprised of a source and one or more actions. I examined test reports for the back-end in a prior post. Therefore, I will focus on the front-end tests here. Select the build_and_test_frontend action to view logs on what the action ran, its configuration details, and the reports it generated. I’m specifically interested in the Unit Test and Code Coverage reports under the Reports tab:

Figure 4. Reports tab showing line and branch coverage.

Select the report unitTests.xml (you may need to scroll). Here, you can see an overview of this specific report with metrics like pass rate, duration, test suites, and the test cases for those suites:

Figure 5. Detailed report for the front-end tests.

This report has passed all checks. To make this report more interesting, I’ll intentionally edit the unit test to make it fail. First, navigate back to the source repository and open web → src → components→ __tests__→TheGrid.spec.js. This test case is looking for the string “Good” so change it to say “Best” instead and commit the changes.

Figure 6. Front-End Unit Test Code Change.

This will automatically start a new workflow run. Navigating back to CI/CD → Workflows, you can see a new workflow run is in progress (takes ~7 minutes to complete).

Once complete, you can see that the build_and_test_frontend action failed. Opening the unitTests.xml report again, you can see that the report status is in a Failed state. Notice that the minimum pass rate for this test is 100%, meaning that if any test case in this unit test ever fails, the build fails completely.

There are ways to configure these minimums which will be explored when looking at Code Coverage reports. To see more details on the error message in this report, select the failed test case.

Figure 7. Failed Test Case Error Message.

As expected, this indicates that the test was looking for the string “Good” but instead, it found the string “Best”. Before continuing, I return to the TheGrid.spec.js file and change the string back to “Good”.

CodeCatalyst also allows me to specify code and branch coverage criteria. Coverage is a metric that can help you understand how much of your source was tested. This ensures source code is properly tested before shipping to a production environment. Coverage is not configured for the front-end, so I will examine the coverage of the back-end.

I select Reports on the left-hand navigation bar, and open the report called backend-coverage.xml. You can see details such as line coverage, number of lines covered, specific files that were scanned, etc.

Figure 8. Code Coverage Report Succeeded.

The Line coverage minimum is set to 70% but the current coverage is 80%, so it succeeds. I want to push the team to continue improving, so I will edit the workflow to raise the minimum threshold to 90%. Navigating back to CI/CD → Workflows → ApplicationDeploymentPipeline, select the Edit button. On the Visual tab, select build_backend. On the Outputs tab, scroll down to Success Criteria and change Line Coverage to 90%.

Figure 9. Configuring Code Coverage Success Criteria.

On the top-right, select Commit. This will push the changes to the repository and start a new workflow run. Once the run has finished, navigate back to the Code Coverage report. This time, you can see it reporting a failure to meet the minimum threshold for Line coverage.

Figure 10. Code Coverage Report Failed.

There are other success criteria options available to experiment with. To learn more about success criteria, see Configuring success criteria for tests.

Cleanup

If you have been following along with this workflow, you should delete the resources you deployed so you do not continue to incur charges. First, delete the two stacks that CDK deployed using the AWS CloudFormation console in the AWS account you associated when you launched the blueprint. These stacks will have names like mysfitsXXXXXWebStack and mysfitsXXXXXAppStack. Second, delete the project from CodeCatalyst by navigating to Project settings and choosing Delete project.

Summary

In this post, I demonstrated how Amazon CodeCatalyst can help developers quickly configure test cases, run unit/code coverage tests, and generate reports using CodeCatalyst’s workflow actions. You can use these reports to adhere to your code testing strategy as a software development team. I also outlined how you can use success criteria to influence the outcome of a build in your workflow. In the next post, I will demonstrate how to configure CodeCatalyst workflows and integrate Software Composition Analysis (SCA) reports. Stay tuned!

About the authors:

Imtranur Rahman

Imtranur Rahman is an experienced Sr. Solutions Architect in WWPS team with 14+ years of experience. Imtranur works with large AWS Global SI partners and helps them build their cloud strategy and broad adoption of Amazon’s cloud computing platform.Imtranur specializes in Containers, Dev/SecOps, GitOps, microservices based applications, hybrid application solutions, application modernization and loves innovating on behalf of his customers. He is highly customer obsessed and takes pride in providing the best solutions through his extensive expertise.

Wasay Mabood

Wasay is a Partner Solutions Architect based out of New York. He works primarily with AWS Partners on migration, training, and compliance efforts but also dabbles in web development. When he’s not working with customers, he enjoys window-shopping, lounging around at home, and experimenting with new ideas.

JavaScript sans build systems?

Posted on February 17, 2023May 21, 2023 by Mark FeehilyComments Off

#626 — February 17, 2023

Read on the Web

JavaScript Weekly

Writing JavaScript Without a Build System — Using a variety of build tools for things like bundling and transpiling is reasonably standard in modern JavaScript development, but what if you want to keep things simple? For simple things, it’s not necessary, says Julia. This led to a lot of discussion on Hacker News.

Julia Evans

Ryan Dahl, Node.js Creator, Wants to Rebuild the Runtime of the Web — A neat bit of journalism about the alternative JavaScript runtime Deno and what Ryan Dahl is trying to achieve with it and how Ryan handled the stress of being known as the creator of Node.js.

Harry Spitzer / Sequoia

Broadcasting a Live Stream With Nothing but JavaScript — Live streams typically use third-party software to broadcast, but with Amazon Interactive Video Service, you can build a powerful, interactive broadcasting interface with the Web Broadcast SDK and JavaScript. Click here to learn more.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) sponsor

core-js’s Maintainer Complains Open Source Is ‘Broken’ — core-js is a popular universal polyfill for JavaScript features and its author has run into his fair share of bad luck which has culminated in this lengthy post on the state of the project, his issues in securing an income and, well, the downsides to living in Russia. The Register has tried to balance out the story.

The Register

IN BRIEF:

? The just released Firefox 110 for Android now supports Tampermonkey, an extension for running JavaScript ‘userscripts’ on sites you visit.

The Angular project is taking steps to revamp its reactivity model to enable fine-grained change detection via signals.

The latest beta of iOS and iPadOS 16.4 supports the Web Push API for home screen webapps.

? A fun Twitter thread where Qwik’s Miško Hevery attempted to demonstrate why a = 0-x is about 3-10x faster than a = -x before being told about a flaw in his benchmark. There is still a performance difference, though.

▶️ The React.js documentary we mentioned last week has now been released and it’s a heck of a watch – you’ll need 78 minutes of your time though.

RELEASES:

Node.js 19.6.1, 18.14.1, 16.19.1 and 14.21.3.

JavaScript Obfuscator 4.0 – Code scrambler.

Shoelace 2.1
↳ Framework agnostic Web components.

Mermaid 9.4
↳ Text to diagram generator. Now with timeline diagram support.

Cypress 12.6

? Articles & Tutorials

Use a MutationObserver to Handle DOM Nodes that Don’t Exist Yet — Comparing the effectiveness of the MutationObserver API with the conventional method of constantly checking for the creation of nodes.

Alex MacArthur

Well-Known Symbols in JavaScript — Hemanth, a TC39 delegate, shows off 14 symbols and where they can come in useful.

Hemanth HM

? Monitor and Optimize Website Speed to Rank Higher in Google — Monitor Google’s Core Web Vitals and optimize performance using in-depth reports built for developers. Improve SEO & UX.

DebugBear sponsor

Why to Use Maps More and Objects Less — A journey down a performance rabbit hole.

Steve Sewell

Adopting React in the Early Days — A personal history lesson providing context around React’s evolution. While React might be an obvious, even safe, choice now, that wasn’t always true.

Sébastien Lorber

An Animated Flythrough with Theatre.js and React Three Fiber — How to fly through a 3D scene using the Theatre.js JavaScript animation library and the React Three Fiber 3D renderer. This is the sort of thing that used to be Very Difficult™ but is now relatively trivial.

Andrew Prifer (Codrops)

How to Change the Tab Bar Color Dynamically with JavaScript

Amit Merchant

Is Deno Ready for Primetime? One Dev’s Opinion

Max Countryman

Using Playwright to Monitor Third-Party Resources That Could Impact User Experience

Stefan Judis

? Code & Tools

Dependency Cruiser: Validate and Visualize JavaScript Dependencies — If you want a look at the output, there’s a whole page of graphs for popular, real world projects including Chalk, Yarn, and React.

Sander Verweij

Devalue: Like JSON.stringify, But.. — “Gets the job done when JSON.stringify can’t.” Namely, it can handle cyclical and repeated references, regular expressions, Map and Set, custom types, and more.

Rich Harris

? JavaScript Scratchpad for VS Code (2m+ Downloads) — Get Quokka.js ‘Community’ for free: #1 tool for exploring/testing JavaScript with edit-continue experience to see realtime execution and runtime values.

Wallaby.js sponsor

NodeGUI: Build Native Cross-Platform Desktop Apps with Node.js — Unlike Electron which leans upon webviews and HTML, NodeGui uses a Qt based approach. This week’s 0.58.0 release is the first stable release based on Qt 6 and offering high DPI support.

NodeGui

DOMPurify 3.0: Fast, Tolerant XSS Sanitizer for HTML and SVG — A project that’s nine years old today but still actively developed. Supports all modern browsers (IE support was only just dropped) and is heavily tested. There’s a live demo here.

Cure53

Pythagora: Generate Express Integration Tests by Recording Activity — This is a neat idea still in its early stages. Add a line of code after setting up an Express.js app and this will capture app usage and generate integration tests based on the interactions. (▶️ Screencast demo.)

zvone187 and LeonOstrez

Try Stream’s Free Trial of SDKs for In-App Chat

Stream sponsor

grep.app: Search Code Across a Half Million GitHub Repos — A code search engine that lets you use regexes or syntax in your search. Considering what it is, it’s pretty fast and has an extensive index (over half a million public repos from GitHub, allegedly).

grep.app

tsParticles: Particles, Confetti and Fireworks for Your Pages — Create customizable particle related effects for use on the Web. Uses the regular 2D canvas for broad support.

Matteo Bruni

? Jobs

Software Engineer — Join our happy team. Stimulus is a social platform started by Sticker Mule to show what’s possible if your mission is to increase human happiness.

Stimulus

Find JavaScript Jobs with Hired — Hired makes job hunting easy-instead of chasing recruiters, companies approach you with salary details up front. Create a free profile now.

Hired

QUICK RELEASES:

Minimatch 6.2
↳ Glob matcher library, as used in npm.
minimatch(“bar.foo”, “*.foo”)

React Accordion 1.2
↳ Unstyled WAI-ARIA-compliant accordion library.

ScrollTrigger 1.0.6
↳ Have your page react to scroll changes.

VeeValidate 4.7.4
↳ Popular Vue.js form library

Express Admin 2.0
↳ Admin interface for data in MySQL/Postgres/SQLite.

Execa 7.0
↳ Improved process execution from Node.js.

React Tooltip 5.8

Bringing JavaScript to WebAssembly

Posted on February 10, 2023May 21, 2023 by Mark FeehilyComments Off

#625 — February 10, 2023

Read on the Web

It looked quiet at first but wow, what an epic week this turned out to be. There’s a lot to chew on here, and we even have a variety of bonus items at the very end of the issue. Enjoy!
__
Your editor, Peter Cooper

JavaScript Weekly

Speeding Up the JS Ecosystem: It’s ESLint’s Turn — Last year we featured an article from the same author about how he was finding, and fixing, low-hanging performance fruit in popular JavaScript projects. He’s back, and he’s found a lot of potential for savings in ESLint this time.

Marvin Hagemeister

The Future (and the Past) of the Web is Server Side Rendering — It’s fair to say the Deno folks have some skin in this game, but nonetheless this is a neat brief history of server-side rendering and why they feel it’s the right approach for modern web development.

Andy Jiang (Deno)

Monitoring Your NestJS Application with AppSignal — With AppSignal, you can monitor your NestJS app with ease and rely on OpenTelemetry to handle third-party instrumentations. AppSignal even provides helper functions to help you build comprehensive custom instrumentation. A box of ? included!

AppSignal sponsor

Ten Web Development Trends in 2023 — Following the State of JS survey results Robin takes a considered look at new web dev trends that we should be paying attention to this year, and why they matter.

Robin Wieruch

Bringing JavaScript to WebAssembly for Shopify Functions — As much as this is focused on a specific use case at Shopify, this is a fascinating look at how they’re integrating JavaScript and WebAssembly under tight constraints. They also talk about Javy, a JS to WebAssembly toolchain being built at Shopify that lets you run JS code on a WASM-embedded JS runtime.

Surma (Shopify)

Google Touts Web-Based Machine Learning with TensorFlow.js

Richard MacManus (The New Stack)

IN BRIEF:

? Time to celebrate — a recent survey allegedly found that JavaScript applications ‘have fewer flaws’ than Java and .NET ones. So there you go.

Honeypot’s highly anticipated ▶️ React.js documentary drops later today – it’ll probably be out by the time you read this.

Vanilla List is a directory of ‘vanilla’ JavaScript controls and plugins.

▶️ Evan You tells us what to expect in 2023 from Vue.js.

The Scala.js project is celebrating its ten year anniversary – it’s now a mature way to build Web projects using Scala, if you prefer.

? Vue.js Live is a JavaScript event taking place both in London and online on May 12 & 15. From the same folks as the also forthcoming JSNation conference.

A history of criticisms levelled at React.

RELEASES:

Eleventy / 11ty 2.0
↳ Popular Node.js static site generator.

pnpm 7.27 – The efficient package manager.

RxDB 14.0 – Offline-first, reactive database.

? Articles & Tutorials

Design Patterns in TypeScript — OO-inspired patterns aren’t for everyone or every use case, but this is a fantastic catalog of examples, complete with diagrams and explanations, if you need to learn to tell apart factory methods from decorators, facades, or proxies.

Refactoring Guru

Resumable React: How To Use React Inside Qwik — Building React apps without ever loading React in the user’s browser? “Sounds too good to be true? Let’s see how this works.”

Yoav Ganbar

Did You Know That You’re Already a Distributed Systems Developer?

Temporal Technologies sponsor

Build a Hacker News Client using Alpine.js — Alpine.js is a thin and elegant reactivity library that lets you add dynamic functionality to your site directly in markup. This is a short and sweet practical example of what you can quickly do with it.

Salai Vedha Viradhan

▶ TypeScript Speedrun: A Crash Course for Beginners — If you want to pick up TypeScript and would find a video guide useful, this is for you. Matt has become well known recently for his educational TypeScript tweets and videos, and this is another good one that flies through the basics. (23 minutes.)

Matt Pocock

Using Notion as a Headless CMS with Nuxt

Trent Brew

The Options API vs Composition API in Vue.js

Charles Allotey

? Code & Tools

Bookmarklet Editor: Easily Work on JavaScript Bookmarklets — Useful because who can remember the exact syntax for a bookmarklet? ? This also can instantly convert code to and from bookmarklet form and includes some examples in the help section (click the big ? to get all the details).

Marek Gibney

Breakpoints and console.log Is the Past, Time Travel Is the Future — 15x faster JavaScript debugging than with breakpoints and console.log, now with support for Vitest.

Wallaby.js sponsor

Yup 1.0: Super Simple Object Schema Validation — Define a schema, transform a value to match, assert the shape of an existing value, or both. Very extensive docs here.

Jason Quense

Material React Table: A Full-Featured React Table Component — Built upon Material UI 5 and TanStack Table 8. The docs include lots of interactive examples.

Kevin Van Cott

BlockNote: Notion-Style Block-Based Text Editor — Built on top of Prosemirror and Tiptap, this is for you if you like the way the Notion note-taking service’s text editor feels. There’s a live demo.

Yousef

TresJS: Build 3D Experiences with Vue.js — Create 3D scenes with Vue components and Three.js. Think React-three-fiber but Vue flavored.

Alvaro Sabu

depngn: Find Out if Dependencies Support a Given Node.js Version — A CLI tool that establishes whether or not the dependencies in your package.json will work against a specified version of Node.

OmbuLabs

Open-Source JS Form Libraries to Automate Your Form Workflow — Self-host SurveyJS to configure and modify multiple forms, convert them to fillable PDF files, and analyze collected data in interactive dashboards.

SurveyJS sponsor

Lawnmower: Build VR Scenes with Custom HTML Tags — A web component library that leans on Three.js and aims “to make building a basic VR website as easy to make as your first HTML site”.

Gareth Marland

Electron 23.0 Released — The popular cross platform JavaScript, HTML + CSS desktop app framework gets bumped up to Node 18.12.1, Chromium 110, and V8 11.0. Windows 7/8/8.1 support has also been dropped, so we might start to see those versions of Windows lose the support of a lot of Electron based apps soon.

Electron Core Team

Run: Run User-Provided Code in a Web Worker

SLASHD Analytics

? Jobs

Software Engineer (Backend) — Join our “kick ass” team. Our software team operates from 17 countries and we’re always looking for more exceptional engineers.

Sticker Mule

Find JavaScript Jobs with Hired — Hired makes job hunting easy-instead of chasing recruiters, companies approach you with salary details up front. Create a free profile now.

Hired

QUICK RELEASES:

vue-easytable 2.23
↳ A data table/grid control for Vue.js. (Demo.)

React-Custom-Scroll 5.0
↳ Customize the browser scroll bar. (Demo.)

react-jsonschema-form 5.1
↳ Component to build Web forms from JSON Schema.

AlaSQL.js 3.1
↳ JavaScript-based SQL database.

jest-puppeteer 7.0
↳ Run tests using Jest & Puppeteer.

MDX 2.3
↳ Markdown for the component era.

? The Bonus Round

✈️ Watching someone wrestle with Python and JavaScript to fly (virtual) planes with Microsoft Flight Simulator tickled me a lot.

A beautiful WebGL2-based fluid simulation. It’s even happy on mobile. Pretty!

Go-like channels in 10 lines of JavaTypeScript..?

? Misko Hevery: “useSignal() is the future of web frameworks and is a better abstraction than useState(), which is showing its age.” (source)

Mike Pennisi asks: when is an object property not a property?

Do you use Postgres at all? Check out Postgres Weekly – one of our sister newsletters. So much is going on in the Postgres space lately and it’s a great way to keep up.

Why document.write() is bad

Posted on January 20, 2023May 21, 2023 by Mark FeehilyComments Off

#622 — January 20, 2023

Read on the Web

JavaScript Weekly

Why Not document.write()? — Many moons ago, document.write was a mainstay of client-side JavaScript code, but it’s long been considered a bad practice – why? Harry digs in, noting that it “guarantees both a blocking fetch and a blocking execution, which holds up the parser for far longer than necessary”.

Harry Roberts

New: The WebAssembly JavaScript Promise Integration API — A technical explanation from the V8 team on a new API to let WebAssembly apps bridge the synchronous / asynchronous gap of expectations around external functionality (consider that many apps are written synchronously, but modern Web APIs are usually asynchronous). JSPI helps bridge both worlds and can be tested via a flag in Chrome.

McCabe, Michaud, Rezvov, Dahl / V8 Team

Break the Programming Mold with Dependency Injection — Keep your code on the cutting edge with dependency injection in JavaScript. Check out Snyk’s guide that gives a breakdown of what dependency injection is, when you should use it, and what popular JavaScript frameworks it’s implemented.

Snyk sponsor

Why Is My Jest Suite So Slow? — Jest is known for its speed and simplicity so the author was surprised at how quickly his team’s test suite was slowing down. This is a write up of the ensuing investigation along with the improvements that slashed test running time.

Steven Lemon

Bun v0.5 Released — Bun is another JavaScript runtime taking the world by storm and a level of Node compatibility has been baked in from the start. v0.5 adds support for node:readline, workspaces, a node:dns shim, and network socket creation support such that more Node.js-based database libraries work out of the box.

Ashcon Partovi

IN BRIEF:

The ▶️ latest episode of the JS Party podcast tackles ‘the rise and fall’ of JavaScript frameworks and the modern trend towards smaller ones.

The folks at NodeSource have put together a top 10 list of Node open-source projects ‘to keep an eye on’ in 2023.

Aurelia 2 is now in beta.

RELEASES:

⭐️ esbuild 0.17.0
↳ Popular bundler. Note that this is a key release with backwards incompatible changes.

Inertia.js 1.0
↳ Build SPAs for any backend.

React Native 0.71

Remix 1.10.0
↳ Popular full stack framework.

? Articles & Tutorials

? Building an Accessible Theme Picker — An attractively presented, easy to follow tutorial for a handy site feature.

Sarah L. Fossheim

Fixing a Memory Leak in a Production Node.js App — Kent encountered a variety of weird memory and CPU usage spikes in his Node-powered app and decided to figure out what was going on. This post walks through his complete journey, with plenty of side problems encountered along the way, before discovering the root cause was where he least expected it.

Kent C Dodds

Build a Mobile-Responsive Telehealth Pager App Using Stream’s Chat API — Build a responsive chat app with emojis/reactions, built-in GIF support, ability to edit/delete messages, direct & group chat, and more.

Stream sponsor

? A Beginner’s Guide to Chrome Tracing — For when you want to go deeper than the Performance tab. With tracing, you can record what a browser is up to far behind the scenes.

Nolan Lawson

Handling Errors Like a Pro in TypeScript — “Learn the design pattern I use to handle errors and write cleaner code.”

Kolby Sisk

A Beginner’s Guide to async/await with Examples

James Hibbard

10 Mistakes to Avoid When Starting with Vue 3

Fotis Adamakis

? Code & Tools

RoughNotation: Cute Animated ‘Rough’ Text Annotations — Uses Rough.js (itself a project worth checking out) to get a hand-drawn look. Lots of nice interactive examples on the page showing a variety of annotation styles (boxes, underlines, circles..)

Preet Shihn

Free Website Speed Test: Does Your Site Meet Google’s Core Web Vitals? — Get an in-depth technical analysis of your site and learn how to make it fast. Rank higher in Google & deliver great UX.

DebugBear sponsor

Modern Errors: Handle Errors in a Simple, Stable, Consistent Way — Create error classes, wrap or aggregate errors, or use one of several plugins to do things like print bug reporting info, print stack traces, or more. Happy in both Node and the browser.

ehmicky

Shifty: A Small, Fast Tweening Engine — All it does is tweening. It’s a low level animation solution that you can integrate into any rendering mechanism of your choice. The examples here demonstrate it well as it can be used for ‘animating’ things in an unconventional sense. GitHub repo.

Jeremy Kahn

Barba.js: For Smooth Visual Transitions Between Pages — You certainly can’t say the project’s homepage doesn’t show off all of its features! For such a dramatic set of effects, things feel smooth and.. surprisingly tolerable ? GitHub repo.

De Rosa, Michel, et al.

Rete.js 1.5: A Framework for Visual Programming — Create a node-based editor in the browser and apply logic. Check out these demos on CodePen. GitHub repo.

Vitaliy Stoliarov

Don’t Let Your Issue Tracker Be a Four-Letter Word. Use Shortcut

Shortcut (formerly Clubhouse.io) sponsor

gpu-io: GPU-Accelerated Computing Library — for physics simulations and other mathematical calculations. A neat look at the power of WebGL. Several examples.

Amanda Ghassaei

Chart.js 4.2
↳ Simple Canvas-based charts. (Samples.)

Serialize JavaScript 6.0.1
↳ Serialize JS to a JSON superset.

axios-retry 3.4
↳ Axios plugin that retries failed requests.

Axios 1.2.3 – Popular HTTP client library.

Commander.js 10.0 – Node.js CLIs made easy.

Mineflayer 4.7 – JS API for Minecraft bots.

Wretch 2.4 – Fetch API wrapper with niceties.

? Jobs

Developer Relations Manager — Join the CKEditor team to build community around an Open Source project used by millions of users around the world ?

CKEditor

Find JavaScript Jobs with Hired — Create a profile on Hired to connect with hiring managers at growing startups and Fortune 500 companies. It’s free for job-seekers.

Hired

Java-Script Jarre

Posted on January 14, 2023May 21, 2023 by Mark FeehilyComments Off

#621 — January 13, 2023

Read on the Web

JavaScript Weekly

The State of JS 2022 — The State of JS is one of the JavaScript ecosystem’s most popular surveys and this time 39,471 folks took part giving us a snapshot of the tools, technologies, and language features people are using (or not using!) There’s a lot to go through, but here are some key points:

top-level await is the most newly adopted feature recently.
The JavaScript / TypeScript balance shows a majority of developers using TypeScript over JS.
Express remains by far the most popular backend framework with Nest, Fastify, Strapi, and Koa following somewhat behind.
Other interesting results can be found in JS pain points, what is currently missing from JS, and the ‘Awards’ for stand out items (complete with snazzy visual effects).

Devographics

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? ButterCMS sponsor

? Is TypeScript Worth It? — Time saver or waste of time? The relationship between TypeScript and JavaScript remains a complex one. An extensive discussion took place on Hacker News this week and, notably, TypeScript PM Daniel Rosenwasser popped up to respond to some of the concerns.

Hacker News

IN BRIEF:

You’ll be aware of JavaScript’s strict mode but one developer thinks we need a stricter mode to fix several other syntax issues.

Publint is an online tool for ‘linting’ live npm packages to see if they are packaged correctly, as a way to ensure maximum compatibility across environments.

RELEASES:

Node v19.4.0 and v18.13.0 (LTS)

Commander.js 9.5
↳ Node.js command-line interface toolkit.

Angular 15.1

Pixi.js 7.1 – Fast 2D on WebGL engine.

? Articles & Tutorials

The Gotcha of Unhandled Promise Rejections — A rough edge with promises that can sneak up on you. Jake looks at a ‘gotcha’ around unhandled promise rejections and how to work around it.

Jake Archibald

HTML with Superpowers: The Guidebook — A free resource introducing Web Components, what they are, and what problems they’re trying to solve. You can see the Guidebook directly here.

Dave Rupert

With Retool You Ship Apps Fast with 100+ Perfectly Crafted UI Components — The fast way for devs to build and share internal tools. Teams at companies like Amazon, DoorDash & NBC collaborate around custom-built Retool apps to solve internal workflows.

Retool sponsor

Everything About React’s ‘Concurrent Mode’ Features — An in-depth, example-led exploration of Concurrent Mode (now more a set of features integrated into React 18 than a distinct ‘mode’).

Henrique Yuji

Using GitHub Copilot for Unit Testing? — Even if you find the idea of a AI tool like Copilot writing production code distasteful, it may have a place in speeding up writing tests.

Ianis Triandafilov

How to Destructure Props in Vue (Composition API) — How to correctly destructure props object in a Vue component while maintaining the reactivity.

Dmitri Pavlutin

Using Inline JavaScript Modules to Prevent CSS Blockage

Stoyan Stefanov

How to Build a GraphQL Server with Deno

Andy Jiang

? Code & Tools

Gluon: Framework for Creating Desktop Apps from Sites — A new approach for building desktop apps on Windows and Linux from Web sites using Node (or Deno) and already installed browsers (Chromium or Firefox). Initial macOS support has just been added too.

Gluon

Structura.js: Lightweight Library for Immutable State Management — ” It is based on the idea of structural sharing. The library is very similar to Immer.js, but it has some advantages over it.”

Giuseppe Raso

Tuple, a Lightning-Fast Pairing Tool Built for Remote Developers — High-resolution, crystal-clear screen sharing, low-latency remote control, and less CPU usage than you’d think possible.

Tuple sponsor

Bay.js: A Lightweight Library for Web Components — Makes it easy to create web components that can be reused across projects. It also boasts performant state changes and secure event binding.

Ian Dunkerley

Twify: Scaffold a Tailwind CSS Project with a Single Command — You can use your preferred package manager and it supports creating projects with Next.js, Nuxt 2/3, SvelteKit, Remix, Angular, and more.

Kazi Ahmed

Lazy Brush 2.0: A Library for Smooth Pointer Drawing — Allow your users to draw smooth curves and straight lines with your mouse, finger or any pointing device. This long standing library has just migrated to TypeScript and gained a new ‘friction’ option to customize the feel. GitHub repo.

Jan Hug

➗ Mafs: React Components for Interactive Math — Build interactive, animated visualizations using declarative code with illustrative demos like bezier curves. The documentation is fantastic – check out how easy it is to make plots. Or just head to the GitHub repo.

Steven Petryk

Are You Looking for a New Observability Tool?

TelemetryHub by Scout sponsor

Hyphenopoly 5.0: A Polyfill for Client-Side Hyphenation — An interesting use of WebAssembly here.

Mathias Nater

visx 3.0
↳ D3-powered visualization React components.

Atrament 3.0
↳ Library for drawing and handwriting on a canvas element.

HLS.js 1.3
↳ Library to play HLS (HTTP Live Streaming) in browsers, with MSE support.

? Jobs

Developer Relations Manager — Join the CKEditor team to build community around an Open Source project used by millions of users around the world ?

CKEditor

Backend Engineer, TypeScript (Berlin / Remote) — Thousands of people love our product (see Trustpilot for yourself). Join the team behind it and help us scale. ?

Feather

Find JavaScript Jobs with Hired — Create a profile on Hired to connect with hiring managers at growing startups and Fortune 500 companies. It’s free for job-seekers.

Hired

? Écoute la musique..

Oxygene Pt 4, as Performed by JavaScript — This is fun. Dittytoy is a simple, JavaScript-powered online generative music tool and someone has put together a surprisingly faithful rendition of perhaps one of the best known instrumental synth songs ever, all the way from 1976.

Dittytoy

Motivation

Getting Started

Parsing an S3 URI

Retrieving query parameters

Caveats

Special Characters

Virtual-hosted-style URIs

Conclusion

Is Frontend Development Easier Than Backend?​​

What is Frontend & Backend Development?

What’s the Difference?

Why Is Frontend Harder Than Backend?

Keeping up with a rapidly changing environment

More information to consider

More tools to learn

Test suites and testing

Why Is Backend Harder Than Frontend?

The higher learning curve for beginners

Frontend is less visually appealing than the backend

Many backend languages

Summary

Introduction

Prerequisites

Walkthrough

Cleanup

Summary

Imtranur Rahman

Wasay Mabood

Is Frontend Development Easier Than Backend?