An open SaaS boilerplate app

#​520 — February 6, 2024

Read on the Web

Wasp: A Rails-Like Framework for React, Node and Prisma — A common complaint I’ve seen about the Node ecosystem on social media is the lack of a ‘big framework’. This seems unfair with Sails and AdonisJS providing at least two options, but Wasp is another compelling option that even refers to itself as Rails-like. There’s a lot to like, particularly with the release of the ‘Open SaaS’ SaaS starter app that can take you several steps down the road to building an app in minutes.

Wasp, Inc.

Learn Advanced JavaScript Performance Optimization — Garbage collection, memory profiling, data structures like sets and arrays, and event loop management. Learn performance-driven programming, preparing you to write blazingly fast and efficient code!

Frontend Masters sponsor

Malicious npm Package Targeting Roblox Users for Data Theft — It feels like we need an ‘evil package of the week’ feature lately. This latest one targeted users of a package for interacting with the Roblox (a popular virtual universe game) API. The post digs into detail on what the rogue package was doing behind the scenes.

Sarah Gooding (Socket)

👾 Separate from the malicious package discussed above, the legitimate Noblox.js package is worth a look if you want to interact with Roblox from Node at all.

IN BRIEF:

• 🚨 A raft of Node.js security releases were due today but these have been pushed back to this Thursday, February 8.

• The latest release of Deno (v1.40) introduces support for the Temporal API and the latest decorator syntax proposal.

Command Line Interface Guidelines — A fantastically presented ‘open source guide’ to writing better command line programs in the time-tested UNIX-y way. There’s much to enjoy here, including a few Node-specific recommendations.

Prasad, Firshman, Tashian, and Parish

💡 On the topic of CLIs, version 12.0 of popular full-featured CLI framework Commander.js has just been released.

Effortless GraphQL with Hasura and TypeScript Functions — Connect to your data sources, generate a GraphQL API, and deploy globally — instantly. Want to write and use TypesScript functions directly in your GraphQL API? With Hasura, you can. Check it out.

Hasura sponsor

How to Stream Files from Next.js Route Handlers — “Despite being Next.js specific, it goes over the philosophical difference between Node.js specific API routes, and runtime-agnostic route handlers, which I think could be interesting to a broader audience of backend JS developers.”

Eric Burel

Topic Classification from Node with Astra Vector Search — An example of using Node to crunch some data and pipe it into Datastax’s Astra vector database (using Mongoose and a JSON API driver) for querying.

Valeri Karpov

🛠 Code & Tools

Marked.js 12.0: Fast Markdown Parsing and Compiling — A low-level Markdown compiler built for speed and available as a client-side library, server-side library, or via a CLI. v12 adjusts things in line with recent updates to the CommonMark spec.

Christopher Jeffrey

🐱 Meow 13.2: A Straightforward CLI App Helper — You define flags, help text, and other features in a single object and it handles all the processing for you. Short, simple, sweet, and no dependencies.

Sindre Sorhus

merge-streams: Merge Multiple Streams Into a Unified One — It’s as simple as

…

Sindre Sorhus

Neutralinojs 5.0: 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

pkg-tools 1.0: An Opinionated Build Toolchain with Typed Configuration — A thin abstraction on top of the unbuild build system that centralizes your build config and helps consistently build packages supporting both CJS and ESM.

Joe McKenney

• Mikro ORM 6.1 – TypeScript ORM for Node.js.

• query-string 8.2 – Parse and stringify URL query strings.

• better-sqlite 9.4 – Neat way to use SQLite (3.45.1) from Node.

• nvm-desktop 3.0 – Electron-powered Node version manager for the desktop.

• xero-node 5.0 – Node SDK for the popular Xero accounting system.

• gaxios 6.2 – HTTP client that’s Axios-like but over

  1	node-fetch

  .

• js-bson 6.3 – MongoDB BSON parser for Node and browsers.

• node-acme-client 5.3 – Simple, unopinionated ACME client.

• Got 14.2 – Human-friendly HTTP request library.

• Pino 8.18 – Fast JSON-powered logging.