~javascriptweekly | 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!

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

👾  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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

⏱  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.

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

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).

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.

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.

🧭  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...

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.

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...