2025 is going to be a bold year for Express.js

#​562 — January 14, 2025

Read on the Web

A New Chapter for Express.js — 2024 saw the still-extremely-popular Express project awaken from a slumber, of sorts, with work being made to update things to modern standards, a security audit, and the release of Express v5. Here, the team explains what’s been going on behind the scenes to get Express back on the tracks, as well as a “bold vision for 2025.”

Express Technical Committee

How to Create Your Own AI Agent — Join Scott Moss for this video course exploring how to build an AI agent from scratch — covering LLM options, transformers, token limits, AI memory, function calling, agent loops, prompting, and much more.

Frontend Masters sponsor

Node v23.6.0 (Current) Released — In last week’s issue, we said Node 23.6 was imminent, and it came out a few hours later 😉 Along with the usual dependency updates and bug fixes, the big news is type stripping is now enabled by default, enabling that

magic, described in more detail below..

Marco Ippolito

Node’s New Built-in Support for TypeScript Explained — Node.js v23.6.0 (Current) (above) makes Node’s new type-stripping features work by default. Dr. Axel digs into how it works and what the limitations are. A handy primer.

Dr. Axel Rauschmayer

IN BRIEF:

• Ecma International has a new technical committee: TC55 – Web Interoperable Server Runtimes. It takes over from the former WinterCG group as a forum for working on ways for server-side JS runtimes (e.g. Node, Deno, Bun) to better interoperate and align their APIs.

• Popular Node.js-powered static site generator Eleventy (11ty) takes a look back at what happened in 2024.

• Node v22.13.0 (LTS) was released with the permission model becoming stable.

• The Electron project is moving its ecosystem over to Node 22.

Horizontal, Vertical, Diagonal? What Even Is Scaling?! 👀 — Up, down, left, right… A+B, A+B?? No no.. scaling isn’t that complicated. Let’s unpack horizontal vs. vertical scaling.

Judoscale sponsor

📄 JavaScript Hashing Speed Comparison: MD5 vs. SHA-256 – You shouldn’t be using MD5 anyway, but you especially shouldn’t be using it with the misconception that it’s faster. Daniel Lemire

📄 Cleaning Up HTML Content with Readability.js – Automatically extract the most valuable part of an HTML document. Phil Nash

📄 AsyncLocalStorage: Simplify Context Management in Node Trevor I. Lasn

🛠 Code & Tools

Node Web Audio API 1.0: A Web Audio API Implementation for Node — More accurately, it’s a set of Node bindings for a Rust-powered non-browser implementation of the Web Audio API.

IRCAM – Centre Pompidou

pnpm 10.0: The Alternative, Efficient Package Manager — Long admired for its performance and efficiency improvements over npm, pnpm is now thinking hard about security too with v10 no longer running lifestyle scripts of dependencies by default, improved hashing, and a myriad of other tweaks.

Zoltan Kochan et al.

Citizen: A Node.js MVC Web Application Framework — Comes with all the usual helpful stuff out of the box: routing, serving, caching, session management, even hot module replacement. It’s currently a lightly updated (though complete) project, but it shows a lot of promise and the author is keen for bug reports and feature requests.

Jay Sylvester

PostalMime: Email Parser for Browser Environments — An email parsing library happy in most JS runtimes, including Node. Takes the raw source of emails and parses them into their constituent parts.

Postal Systems

Simple Redis Mutex: Simple Distributed Locking using Redis

Amr Saber

• Puppeteer 24.0 – Popular high level API to control Chrome or Firefox.

• AWS JWT Verify 5.0 – Verify JWTs signed by Amazon Cognito and any OIDC-compatible IDP. v5.0 adds support for ECDSA and EdDSA algorithms.

• 🤖 node-llama-cpp 3.4 – Run LLMs locally with bindings to 

  1

  llama.cpp

  .

• jsdom 26.0 – Pure JS implementation of web standards for Node.

• node-pg-migrate 7.9 – Postgres migration management from Node.

• Mineflayer 4.25 – Create Minecraft bots in JavaScript.

• Octokit.js 4.1 – ‘Batteries-included’ GitHub SDK.

• Strapi 5.7 – Popular Node.js headless CMS.

• ESLint 9.18.0

📢  Elsewhere in JavaScript

A quick roundup of some of other interesting stories in the broader JavaScript landscape, in case you’ve missed them:

• The 2024 JavaScript Rising Stars – Michael Rambeau’s annual analysis of which JavaScript projects fared best on GitHub over the past year.

• Last week we learnt that Oracle isn’t giving up without a fight in Deno’s pursuit to get Oracle’s trademark on ‘JavaScript’ withdrawn.

• TypeScript without Build Tools – It’s not just Node that can now work with TypeScript without a build process in the mix. Chris Coyier looks at how other projects handle it.

• Electrobun – An interesting attempt at a new Electron-style solution for building desktop apps with JavaScript, but powered by Bun. It’s still early days, however.