Bookmarks (261)

JS Crush: Match Values That Are Equal in JS — The author’s comment that this is “a game that mocks JS equality quirks, the most absurd feature of the language” should put you in the right frame of mind for giving this Candy Crush-inspired casual game a go!

👾  n64js: A Nintendo 64 Emulator in JavaScript — There’s a Web-based version to try (if you have the right files) or just ▶️ watch a video.

Chardet 2.0: Character Encoding Detection Library — It uses statistical methods to determine the most likely encoding of a supplied buffer, string, or file, from a selection of about 30.

Instant.dev: A New Postgres-Focused ORM for JavaScript — Aims to introduce a more Ruby on Rails/Active Record-style experience to the increasingly rich JavaScript ORM ecosystem.

Industry-Leading JavaScript Components for the Web — Build your apps with powerful JavaScript developer tools including reporting solutions, spreadsheets, and UI components.

ChatGPT.js: A Library for Working with ChatGPT via the DOM — Includes a fairly extensive API that lets you interact with ChatGPT for use in Chrome extensions, Tampermonkey scripts, and so on.

Tesseract.js 5.0: JavaScript OCR for 100+ Languages — A port of the C++-based Tesseract library used to extract text from images. v5.0 is a big deal as there are huge file size reductions resulting in a 50% decrease in runtime size, a similar reduction in memory use, and iOS 17 compatiblity. GitHub repo.

Thoughts on Svelte 5 as a 3+ Year Full-Time Svelte Dev — Thoughts that lead to the proposal of Pelte, an attempt to spark conversation rather than a real tool (so far).

Drawing on Google Maps with Drawing Manager — A particularly thorough, code-rich followup to Integrating Google Maps in React.

⏱  Why the Temporal API is Awesome — It’s still a stage 3 proposal, but the Temporal API works around some of Date’s limitations without third-party libraries.

Upgrading Frontend Dependencies with Confidence — Writing tests for logic in our apps is easy, but how can you determine if a component isn't rendering properly? Visual regression testing. Here's a workflow based on GitHub Actions, Playwright, and Argos.

One Thing Nobody Explained To You About TypeScript — The author makes a strong case for creating a separate tsconfig.json for each environment your code runs in: “Today, I write about one thing about configuring TypeScript that took me years to realize. I’m sure you’re making the same mistake as I did.”

The Saga of Google's Closure Compiler — Dan looks back at Google’s Closure Compiler, a JavaScript transpiler Google built in 2004 and used most heavily in the pre-TypeScript era to reduce the size of JavaScript files, check types, and otherwise handle common pitfalls. A neat bit of JavaScript history.

Building Cross-Platform Desktop Apps with Electron — In this detailed video course Steve Kinney shares how to build robust, user-friendly Electron-based desktop apps, covering key concepts like main and renderer processes, inter-process communication, security, and more.

Speeding up the JavaScript Ecosystem: Polyfills Gone Rogue — Marvin's mission to speed up popular libraries continues. First blogging on the topic last year, now he’s looking at the role polyfills play in making packages large and inefficient. There are two sides to every story, though, as this Hacker News thread found.

Swup: A Flexible Page Transition Library for Server-Side Rendered Sites — A library that benefits hugely from checking out the demos. v4.4 adds experimental ViewTransition support.

▶  TypeScript Origins: The Documentary — You know you’ve made it when you get your own documentary! This has just dropped but is well produced, packed with stories from TypeScript’s co-creators, users, and other folks at Microsoft, and kept me entertained. It goes particularly deep into the motivations and process behind TypeScript's creation, including why Microsoft felt it was worth pursuing at all.

Patterns for Reactivity with Modern Vanilla JavaScript — When data changes, you often want to do things, and the process that makes that happen is reactivity. While many libraries or frameworks like React or Vue offer reactive solutions out of the box, you can do it all with vanilla JavaScript too, and this post digs into many of the patterns you might need to...

Handsontable: Data Grid With Spreadsheet Superpowers — There are a lot of JavaScript data grids out there, but none are quite like Handsontable. Its Excel-like design, keyboard shortcuts, and navigation make it the perfect tool for developers.

Deno 1.37: Modern JavaScript in Jupyter Notebooks — Not content to let Bun take all the headlines, Deno has come up with something pretty neat here. Deno 1.37 ships with a Jupyter Notebook integration so you can create interactive REPL sessions but using the JavaScript you know and love, rather than Python.

JavaScript Minification Benchmarks — A frequently updated benchmark suite and results comparing the speed and quality of JavaScript minification across a variety of tools including esbuild, Babel, Bun, SWC, and Uglify.

Getting Network Activity Under Control with Priority Hints — A look at how browsers can prioritize the loading of resources, how you can explicitly specify a priority when using fetch, and how different ways of loading scripts are prioritized.

Securing Node Apps by Analyzing Real Command Injection Examples — When code can be manipulated to run unintended, arbitrary commands, it's never going to end well.

🚀  Coming Soon: Fixed-Cost Monthly Maintenance by UpgradeJS.com — Too much tech debt in your JavaScript app? Let us help. Slow and steady upgrades at your own pace. Releasing next week.

🧭  What's New in Safari 17 — Safari 17 is now in beta on iOS 17 with the final release dropping across all of Apple’s platforms next week. On the JavaScript front, Safari and WebKit now fully support the Storage API, WebGL in Offscreen Canvas, v flag support on regexes, Set operation methods, URL.canParse, plus the much anticipated support for PWAs in macOS Sonoma.

fx 30: The Go(lang)-Powered Terminal JSON Viewer — Yes, it's written in Go, but fx has long been a useful tool for looking at JSON files, and it has just been rewritten from the ground up with a new look, regex search, fuzzy search, and support for “even the most massive JSON files.” You don't need to worry about Go at all; it's simply a...

Mantine 7.0: The Popular React Component Library — A big release for what is now one of the most popular React component libraries. As of v7, Mantine no longer relies on Emotion and components come with native CSS files, all components now support the system-set color scheme, CSS modules are now the default way to style components, and there are many smaller enhancements too.

Chrono 2.7: A Natural Language Date Parser — Give it a string like “today”, “last Friday”, “2 weeks from now”, or even an entire date and time, and it’ll come up with a date object to suit.

Theatre.js 0.7: Motion Design for the Web — Can be used both programmatically or via a visual editor to animate objects created with things like Three.js, React Three Fiber, HTML/SVG, or even just tween variable values.

Create Chrome Extension: A Scaffolding Tool for Chrome Extensions — Similar to create-react-app or Yeoman, this is specifically for starting extension development, with support for several frameworks, HMR, and light/dark modes.

Bun 1.0: Is It a Toolkit? Is It a Runtime? It's Both — You’ve used Node, you’ve seen Deno, now Bun has grown up too. It’s a performance-oriented server-side JS runtime built atop JavaScriptCore and makes the unique claim of being “a drop-in replacement for Node.js.” It includes extras like transpilation, bundling, package management, and a Jest-compatible test runner too. The post goes into...

TensorFlow.js: Machine Learning for JavaScript Developers — Slightly lower level, but a great way to train and deploy models in the browser or in Node.js. There are, of course, lots of demos, too.

WebLLM: Run LLM Models in the Browser with WebGPU — Less directly JavaScript, as it uses WebGPU, but yet another way to run large language models directly within the browser and that you can control from JavaScript. GitHub repo.

Transformers.js: State-of-the-Art Machine Learning for the Web — A JavaScript library designed to be functionally equivalent to Hugging Face’s transformers Python library meaning you can run the same pretrained models using a very similar API. You can do things like ML-powered speech recognition directly in your browser using OpenAI’s Whisper model. GitHub repo.

xterm.js 5.3.0: Build Terminals in the Browser — It’s used in many projects like VS Code, cPanel, Azure Cloud Shell, and other browser-based IDEs. There’s a live demo on the homepage to try.

Shadcn for Vue: Components You Can Copy and Paste — A community-led Vue port of the React-oriented shadcn/ui, a suite of attractive components built with Tailwind CSS and Radix UI, thus making them easy to ‘copy and paste’ into your own apps.

Running a Playwright Script on AWS Lambda — If you’ve struggled to make it work too, Matt has some pointers.

▶  Building a Mario Game Complete with Auth and Score Saving — Ania tackles the implementation of a game in her usual thorough, step-by-step manner.

Frontend Performance Monitoring 101 — Learn the basics of JavaScript application performance monitoring to see (and fix) slow faster. Join us for a live AMA.

JPEG and EXIF Data Manipulation in JavaScript — A look at how to pick through the JPEG format and read and replace EXIF tags directly without leaning on a third party library.

JavaScript's New Array Grouping Methods — A look at Object.groupBy and Map.groupBy. The proposal including these methods is currently at stage 3 at TC39, but initial support is creeping into dev builds of browsers.

A First Look at TypeScript 5.3 — TypeScript 5.2 landed a few weeks ago, which means TypeScript 5.3 is already in the works (the final release is due in November), with possible features to think about including Import Attributes, throw expressions, and isolated declarations.

The Complete UI Component Library For Enterprise Web Apps — A professional UI component library with power widgets like data grid, calendar, scheduler & Gantt charts. Includes API docs, guides and an unreasonable amount of demos to play with. Seamlessly integrates with React, Angular, Vue & Salesforce apps.

Why Does every() Return true for Empty Arrays? — Nicholas wondered how a condition can possibly be satisfied when there aren’t any values to test, so he dug into the language specs to understand the logic.