fidzu : javascript

#​729 - March 28, 2025

Read on the Web

JavaScript Weekly

⭐ The State of Vue.js Report 2025 - Created with the support of the Vue and Nuxt teams, this is no mere collection of statistics and charts (though there's plenty of both) but a thorough update on the state of both projects and an interview with Evan You on Vue (and Vite's) latest developments. Essential reading for any Vue, Vite, or Nuxt user and a one-stop shop for understanding Vue and Nuxt as they stand right now.

Monterail

Master Chrome's DevTools - Join Jon Kuperman for this video course diving into Chrome's DevTools. You'll go beyond console.log(), learning how to inspect, debug, and audit your web apps - tracking performance, identifying bottlenecks, making performance gains, and more. Level up your DevTools skills.

Frontend Masters sponsor

War Story: The Hardest Bug I Ever Debugged - A former engineer on the Google Docs team tells the tale of a bizarre error that afflicted Google Docs out of the blue about ten years ago. It's a gnarly one and was only solved due to his swift access to V8's engineers. If you've ever spent hours digging into a bug, you'll feel glad you weren't dealing with this one!

Jacob Voytko

Next.js's Recent Middleware Security Woes - Last weekend, a new version of Next.js landed to resolve a security vulnerability that could allow middleware to be bypassed. Self-hosted Next.js deployments need to be upgraded immediately. The news led to many responses including deep dives into the vulnerability and criticism of how it was all handled.

Lee Robinson (Vercel)

IN BRIEF:

• Cloudflare has done some work to bring the URLPattern URL matching API to Node.js and Cloudflare Workers.

• 🤖 If you haven't checked out Google's Gemini AI tool recently (or ever), it now supports generating HTML, JavaScript, and React code in a 'canvas' mode for building components on the fly.

• 🤖 MCP Node.js Debugger is an attempt to make Node's debugger more accessible to third-party AI coding tools (such as Cursor or Claude Code).

• 📊 Is Vite faster than Turbopack? "Well, it depends."

RELEASES:

• Bun v1.2.7 - Bun's HTTP server now has built-in support for reading and writing cookies using a Map-like API.

• Node v18.20.8 (LTS) - Note that Node 18 reaches 'end-of-life' next month.

• Sinon 20.0 - Test spies, stubs and mocks library.

• pnpm 10.7, Babel 7.27.0, ESLint 9.23.0, Neutralinojs 6.0, Material UI v7

📒 Articles & Tutorials

Writing a Tiny Undo/Redo Stack in JavaScript - You might prefer to lean upon an established approach (using Immer patches perhaps), but if you want to implement something small yourself, this might help.

Julik Tarkhanov

Land Ahoy: Leaving the Sea of Nodes - A deeply technical post from a core member of the V8 JavaScript engine team that explains the limitations of Turbofan, one of V8's optimizing compilers. If you don't care for the internals of how your JavaScript is compiled and run, just be assured the V8 team is working to make it run even faster.

Darius Mercadier (V8)

Which AI Model Is Best for Fixing Unit Test Errors? Claude, O3-Mini, GPT-4o? - Better context wins every time. Wallaby provides AI with test coverage and runtime values to debug smarter. MCP support coming soon.

Wallaby Team sponsor

Mission jQuery Zero: How FreeAgent Removed jQuery From Its App - Despite popular developer sentiment, jQuery's prevalence on the Web continues to be significant but "sometimes legends need to retire".

Colin Gemmell

▶ React Query API Design: Lessons Learned - You might know Dominik for all his work on React Query, TanStack Router, and his epic React Query - The Bad Parts series. Here, he walks us through the design choices made while building React Query and shares lessons and mistakes valuable to anyone building their own libraries. (30 minutes.)

Dominik Dorfmeister (TkDodo)

Deploying a Next.js App to Production on Any Server - A popular article from last year that's been updated for 2025 and Next.js 15.

Kamrannetic

🔒 Protect Against AI Bots, Fraud, and Abuse in Real Time - WorkOS Radar protects your app with advanced device fingerprinting - stop fake signups, free tier abuse, bot attacks and brute force attempts today.

WorkOS sponsor

📄 Expressing Japanese Grammar in the TypeScript Type System - A curious project out of left field. Yifeng Wang

📄 Directives: A Core Feature of the Angular Toolkit Vyacheslav Borodin

📄 You Should Know This Before Choosing Next.js Eduardo Bouças

🛠 Code & Tools

Babylon.js 8.0: Microsoft's JavaScript 3D Engine - 8.0 adds support for improved 'image based lighting' and 'area lights' for environmental lighting and shadows, extra control of the render pipeline, and a new lightweight viewer. And, as always, they have ▶️ a short video showing it all off.

Microsoft

🤖 An MCP Server for Playwright and Browser Automation - MCP (Model Context Protocol) servers enable certain LLM-based agents (such as Claude, Claude Code, and Cursor) to perform actions on a system outside of their usual sandbox. This new project from Microsoft enables such LLMs to interact with browsers via Playwright.

Microsoft

Lexical 0.29: An Easy-to-Extend Text Editor Framework from Meta - A text editor framework built by Meta with extensibility, accessibility, and cross platform support in mind (there's even a Swift variant for iOS). There's a live playground if you want to give it a try.

Meta / Facebook

🔎 Fuzzball: Fuzzy String Matching Library - To tackle those cases where what's typed isn't quite what's wanted. There's a neat tree-themed Web-based demo.

Nolan

• Axios 0.30 - Long-standing, promise-based isomorphic HTTP client.

• Solito 4.4 - React Native + Next.js. Now supporting Next.js 15.

• InversifyJS 7.2 - Inversion of control container for JavaScript.

• jscodeshift 17.3 - JavaScript codemod toolkit from Facebook.

• Verdaccio 6.1 - Lightweight Node.js private proxy registry.

📢 Elsewhere

A quick roundup of other interesting updates and useful resources from across the broader developer landscape:

• <select> elements have always been notoriously tricky to style with CSS but there's a new standardized approach beginning to become available.

• ls-lint is a mature tool for linting file and directory names.

• Someone's managed to get Go code to compile and run on the PlayStation 2.

• 👑 People's experiments with TypeScript's type system continue with the latest creation being a chess engine built from TypeScript types.

• LLM wrangler Simon Willison was getting annoyed at being unable to easily visualize incomplete JSON documents so he built an 'incomplete JSON' pretty printer.

#​728 - March 21, 2025

Read on the Web

JavaScript Weekly

Rsdoctor 1.0: An Analyzer for Rspack and Webpack - A one-stop, intelligent build analyzer making it easier to identify bottlenecks and optimize performance. It's part of the same family of tools as Rspack (a Rust-powered web bundler) but is fully webpack compatible. If you've ever asked why your build times are too long, this is for you.

ByteDance Inc.

💡 In other Rust-powered JavaScript tooling news, the Oxlint JavaScript linter is now in beta. Imagine ESLint, but it runs in seconds on large codebases (indeed, it can process Microsoft's VS Code repo in under a second).

Add Excel-like Spreadsheet Functionality to Your JavaScript Apps - SpreadJS is the industry-leading JavaScript spreadsheet for adding advanced spreadsheet features to your enterprise apps. Build finance, analysis, budget, and other apps. Excel I/O, 500+ calc functions, tables, charts, and more. View demos now.

SpreadJS from MESCIUS inc sponsor

📉 How We Made Our Rich Text Editor Load Faster - CKEditor is a long-standing, full featured GPL and commercially licensed rich text editor but its complexity can come with a performance cost. In this two part series (part two here), the CKEditor team digs into how they've recently significantly boosted its performance.

Szymon Cofalik (CKEditor)

Next.js vs TanStack - An incisive essay from a developer who's had enough of the Next.js approach and has found solace in the approach offered by the increasingly capable TanStack collection of tools (as well as Vite).

Kyle Gill

IN BRIEF:

• This automatically updated runtime compatibility table lets you see how/if different server-side JavaScript runtimes support different APIs.

• 💬 If you'd like to hang out on Discord and chat with other Node.js developers, there's now an official Node.js Discord server.

• The Node.js TSC has voted to stop distributing Corepack with future versions of Node. Corepack was originally introduced as a way to manage other package managers.

• 🛠️ Make Bookmarklets is a handy tool for turning JavaScript into bookmarklet code that you can use directly in a browser bookmark.

RELEASES:

• Parcel v2.14.0 - The zero-config bundler adds a new CLI to scaffold apps, first-class MDX support, and beta support for React Server Components.

• Ionic 8.5 - Cross-platform JS app development platform.

• 📊 Billboard.js 3.15.0 - D3-powered JS chart library.

• React Router 7.4

📒 Articles & Tutorials

How to Build a Snake AI Game with Docker and TensorFlow.js - You've probably heard about people 'vibe coding' games by letting LLMs do the coding work, but what if you want to build a game yourself that has neural network powered elements? TensorFlow.js offers one solution that you could just as easily adapt to non-gaming contexts.

Manvar and Raina (Docker)

The Great ESLint v9 Migration Adventure: A Developer's Survival Guide - "Let's just say… I've seen things. I hit all the bumps, took all the wrong turns, and somehow made it to the other side-so you don't have to."

Yacine Kharoubi

🔒 Protect Against AI Bots, Fraud, and Abuse in Real Time - WorkOS Radar protects your app with advanced device fingerprinting - stop fake signups, free tier abuse, bot attacks and brute force attempts today.

WorkOS sponsor

React Trends in 2025 - Each year Robin does a post giving his opinion on what trends he sees arising over the next year. Last year, he put his money on Astro, RSCs, Vercel, and Biome - this year he points at React Server Components, shadcn/ui, TanStack Start, React Router, and more.

Robin Wieruch

Build a Custom RAG AI Agent with TypeScript and Jupyter - Deno, Ollama, and a few different AI models come together in this tutorial for storing document embeddings in a vector store and querying them for use in a basic agent.

Kitson Kelly

📄 Training AI to Uncover Malicious JavaScript Intent and Make the Web Safer Cejuela and Zheng (Cloudflare)

📄 Lazy Load Background Images with the IntersectionObserver API Anna Monus

📄 Web Components vs. Framework Components: What's the Difference? Gabriel Shoyombo

📄 Detecting Browser Zoom Changes in JavaScript Kirupa Chinnathambi

📄 Making a Browser Based Game With Vanilla JS and CSS Eoin McGrath

📄 Deno Shows Us There's a Better Way Mac Chaffee

🛠 Code & Tools

Introducing Motion for Vue - Motion is a popular and powerful animation library most commonly associated with React, but now there's a new Vue flavor and it's feature complete, too.

Matt Perry (Motion)

Reveal.js 5.2: The HTML Presentation Framework - Brings elegant presentations to anyone with a Web browser. v5.2 adds the ability to trigger 'lightboxes' where viewers can see images and videos in a way where they stand out more.

Hakim El Hattab

Introducing @clerk/agent-toolkit - Build agentic systems with support for user and organizational management. Compatible with Vercel's AI SDK and LangChain.

Clerk sponsor

Konva: A JavaScript 2D Canvas Library - The native API for Canvas elements is pretty good, but Konva is a popular abstraction that sits on top and provides a more structured way to work with shapes, styling, events, animations, and more (lots of demos with code). It also has extra integration libraries for Vue, Svelte and React.

Konva

Typist 8.0: Tiptap-Based Rich Text Editor Component - Simple and opinionated. You can try several examples linked in the sidebar. Well suited for basic rich text situations like writing comments or messages and has a single-line mode. GitHub repo.

Doist

PeanoScript: TypeScript But It's a Theorem Prover - An experimental proof assistant for Peano arithmetic based on TypeScript syntax.

mjgrzymek

• Gridstack.js 11.5 - Build responsive interactive dashboards quickly.

• Repomix 0.3 - Pack an entire repository into a single, AI-friendly file.

• DOCX 9.3 - Generate .docx / Word files from JavaScript.

• 🖼️ Parvus 3.0 - Dependency-free image lightbox control.

• BlockNote 0.26 - 'Notion-style' block-based editor.

• 🤖 wllama 2.3 - WebAssembly binding for llama.cpp.

• Pixi.js 8.9 - Fast, flexible 2D WebGL renderer.

📢 Elsewhere

A quick roundup of other interesting updates and useful resources from across the broader developer landscape:

• John Tuckner took a look at the murky world of buying browser extensions for 'fun and profit.'

• If you're using VS Code and GitHub Copilot, did you know you can ask Copilot about VS Code's own features?

• Ever wondered what's involved in building a container image from scratch?

• A look at building a Lisp interpreter in 66 lines of JavaScript.

• "As an engineer, I'd rather be called stupid than stay silent."

#​727 - March 14, 2025

Read on the Web

JavaScript Weekly

A Perplexing JavaScript Parsing Puzzle - It looks deceptively simple - just 14 characters of JavaScript - but after working with JavaScript for 29 years, I got it wrong. A clue: it goes back to a browser-related quirk from 30 years ago..

Hillel Wayne

TypeScript's Compiler to Get 10x Faster - TypeScript has shaken up the JavaScript ecosystem in recent years with an increasing number of developers relying on its strong typing and added structure. TypeScript's compiler isn't particularly fast, though, but the TypeScript team at Microsoft are changing that by porting it to Go!

Anders Hejlsberg (Microsoft)

💡 Dr. Axel Rauschmayer takes a closer look at the details behind the port.

Build a Secure Project Management - Learn a security-first approach to building web applications by building a secure project management platform with Next.js.

Clerk sponsor

IN BRIEF:

• Node.js v20.19.0 (LTS) is a notable release for a maintenance branch of Node as an exception has been made to the maintenance policy for backporting require(esm) support, which is now enabled by default.

• The latest version of Chrome (and preview versions of Firefox and Safari) support two new HTML attributes, command and commandfor, for adding declarative actions to HTML buttons without directly requiring JavaScript.

RELEASES:

• Nuxt 3.16 - Popular Vue meta-framework. Now with a new create-nuxt tool for starting projects.

• Bun 1.2.5 - Now with much better Node-API compatibility, CSRF generation and verification, plus numerous perf improvements and fixes.

• Melange 5 - An OCaml-to-JavaScript compiler.

• Astro 5.5, Transformers.js 3.4, Capacitor 7.1, Nuxt UI v3

📒 Articles & Tutorials

Building APIs with Next.js - A detailed, official introduction to the concepts behind using Next.js' App Router and route handlers to build public APIs you can expose to web, mobile, and third-party clients.

Lee Robinson

How The New York Times Migrated from Enzyme to React Testing Library - A thorough look at the technical challenges and strategies the NYT used to perform a piecemeal upgrade of its React testing approach without disrupting either end users or other developers.

Felipe Buenaño (NYT Open Team)

Which AI Model Is Best for Fixing Unit Test Errors? Claude, o3-mini, GPT-4o? - Better context wins every time. Wallaby enters the chat to give AI what it needs - test coverage and runtime values - to debug smarter.

Wallaby Team sponsor

How ECMAScript Engines Optimize Your Variables - From the authors of the Boa JS Rust-powered JavaScript engine.

Boa Developers

📄 Use Cases for the Document Picture-in-Picture API - A way to open a floating, always-on-top window ('picture-in-picture') that can display arbitrary HTML content. Chrome only, though. Jad Joubran

📄 Using Intl.DurationFormat to Format Time Durations with Locale Support Trevor I. Lasn

📄 Learn Zod So You Can Trust Your Data and Your Types Diana MacDonald

📄 10 Hidden Gems in Angular That You Should Use IE 33

📄 Underrated Angular Features Armen Vardanyan

🛠 Code & Tools

Refractor 5.0: Robust Virtual Syntax Highlighting using Prism - Wraps the powerful Prism syntax highlighter to output objects instead of an HTML string so you can manipulate and render it as you wish (e.g. in a VDOM or at the terminal). Lowlight, by the same author, offers the same functionality but backed by highlight.js.

Titus Wormer

svg2pdf.js: SVG to PDF Conversion in the Browser - There's an online playground to give you a feel for what it can do.

yWorks GmbH

🔒 Protect Against AI Bots, Fraud, and Abuse in Real Time - WorkOS Radar protects your app with advanced device fingerprinting - stop fake signups, free tier abuse, bot attacks and brute force attempts today.

WorkOS sponsor

⌘K: A Fast, Composable, Unstyled 'Command Menu' Control - The home page includes some neat examples in a variety of styles. GitHub repo. Needs React 18+.

Paco Coursey

🔎 Node Modules Inspector - A tool that runs pnpm inside your browser, "installs" a package, then analyzes its dependencies. This can be useful for analyzing packages you already use, but also for simplifying your own projects, as 11ty's Zach Leatherman did here.

Anthony Fu

PGlite: Run Postgres in WebAssembly - PGlite packages a WASM build of Postgres into a TypeScript library that can be run directly from Node.js (or Bun, Deno, and even the browser) and it's only a few megabytes in size.

ElectricSQL / Neon

• Gleam 1.9 - Type-safe functional programming language that targets both the Erlang VM and JavaScript runtime.

• <css-doodle> 0.42 - Web component for drawing patterns with CSS.

• Faker 9.6 - Generate fabricated data to your heart's content.

• Choices 11.1 - Configurable select box/text input plugin.

• 🕒 Spacetime 7.8 - Lightweight timezone library.

• Ink 5.2 - Use React to build CLI apps.

📢 Elsewhere

A quick roundup of some of other interesting updates or useful resources in the broader developer landscape:

• ⭐ A fantastic introduction to latency in IO devices (above) over on the PlanetScale blog, complete with very useful interactive diagrams built in JavaScript.

• The Evil Martians explain things you can consider to make your open source project more popular.

• 🤖 Esteemed LLM-whisperer Simon Willison drops a ton of insights and tips on how he uses LLMs to help him write code.