Looking through the Node toolbox

#​543 — August 6, 2024

Read on the Web

🏖️ Hi! We’re taking next week off for a brief summer break. We’ll be back with our next issue on August 20.

We’ve also noticed in testing that Gmail isn’t entirely sure about this issue, so if you could mark it as safe, show images, perhaps click a link or two, etc. that would be very helpful to signal that we’re legit! Thank you 🙂
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Peter Cooper, your editor

Node.js Toolbox: A Way to Find and Compare Node.js Packages — A fantastic community maintained resource that presents a category-based way to find packages and libraries. For example, you can check out HTTP frameworks, browser testing, query builders, and more. You can compare libraries in various ways, see their download count, or edit/submit listings yourself.

Maxim Orlov

Level Up Your Next.js Skills — Join Scott Moss for this detailed video course on intermediate Next.js. Learn how to build production-ready apps by diving into concepts such as server actions, data fetching, protected routes, form authentication, performance caching, and more.

Frontend Masters sponsor

The Node.js Best Practices List: 2024 Edition — An in-depth guide for Node developers that we link to most years. Divided into 8 sections and updated regularly, it digs into areas from error handling and code style to Docker and security practices.

Yoni Goldberg

IN BRIEF:

• Dr. Axel Rauschmayer has updated this Exploring JavaScript book for ES2024 and it remains free to read, in full, online.

• 📊 Benchmarks are always prone to problems and misinterpretation, so always look at them with a critical eye, but Trevor Lasn has pitted Node.js, Bun, and Deno against each other with ulimately little between them..

• Ryan Dahl explains what Deno got wrong about HTTP imports and how it’s moving forward.

📄 What’s New for Developers in ECMAScript 2024 – High-level analysis of the latest developments. Mary Branscombe (The New Stack)

📄

and How to Deal with It Andrey Novikov

🛠 Code & Tools

Neon: Rust Bindings for Writing Node.js Modules — Or, as they put it: “Electrify Node.js with the power of Rust.” Neon makes it relatively easy to write code in the popular, high speed systems language and run it from Node, much like any other native extension. GitHub repo.

Neon Contributors

MongoDB In-Memory Server: Spins Up MongoDB Quickly for Testing — No emulation involved – this spins up a memory-only instance of a real MongoDB server temporarily in order to run integration tests in isolation.

Pavel Chertorogov

Stop Worrying About Your Auth. Let FusionAuth Handle It — Try out the FusionAuth Express.js API quickstart and learn how to protect your API from unauthorized usage (there may even be a free t-shirt in it.)

FusionAuth sponsor

JS-PyTorch: A PyTorch-Like Library for JavaScript — Recently renamed from JS-Torch, this brings some of the magic from Python’s popular PyTorch library to JavaScript for training and testing neural networks in particular. We linked to it earlier this year, but it has added GPU support thanks to GPU.js.

Eduardo Leao

Neutralinojs 5.3: Alternative Cross-Platform Desktop App Approach — Neutralinojs offers an interesting lightweight alternative to something like Electron, as it still lets you build apps that run on Linux, Windows and macOS, but Chromium isn’t bundled – instead the existing installed browser engine is used.

CodeZri

easy-template-x: Generate

/Word Documents from Templates — Given a template document with Mustache-esque tags, this can switch in different content in a ‘mail merge’ style.

Alon Bar

Tedious 18.4: A TDS Module for Connecting to SQL Server — Pure JS implementation of the TDS protocol that’s used to interact with instances of Microsoft’s SQL Server.

Mike D Pilsbury

• Eleventy v3.0.0 Beta 1 – An exciting beta release for the very popular Node-based static site generator.

• express-openapi-validator 5.3.1 – Auto-validate API requests and responses in Express against an OpenAPI 3.x spec.

• pg-mem 2.9.1 – In-memory emulated Postgres for unit testing in JavaScript.

• ArangoJS 9.0 – Driver for the ArangoDB graph database.

• Pongo 0.9 – Postgres driver for Node.js that presents as a MongoDB-style API.

• file-type 19.4 – Detect the file type of a file, stream, or data.

• nvm 0.40 – Node Version Manager.