Opening up the Node.js toolbox

#​497 — August 1, 2023

Read on the Web

PythonMonkey: JavaScript/WASM Interop for Python — The alpha release of a new way to bring Python and JavaScript together, by way of embedding Mozilla SpiderMonkey into the Python VM. This post introduces the concept with some examples, an idea of where the project is headed, as well as some Colab demos. Despite using SpiderMonkey rather than V8, Node and npm compatibility is important to the project and more Node integration is on its roadmap. GitHub repo.

Will Pringle

🛠  Node.js Toolbox: A Way to Find Node.js Packages — Several months ago we featured this brand new project curating Node packages in areas like HTTP frameworks, browser testing and query builders, and it’s continued to go from strength to strength. They’ve recently added a feature to compare the weekly download numbers of packages in each category.

Maxim Orlov

New Course: The Hard Parts of UI Development — Develop an under-the-hood knowledge of UI development by learning techniques such as data binding, UI composition, templating, virtual DOM and its reconciliation, and hooks, all from scratch!

Frontend Masters sponsor

Speeding Up V8 Heap Snapshots — When diagnosing a memory leak in a JavaScript app, engineers at Bloomberg encountered some weird performance issues with capturing a single full-size heapshot taking more than 30 minutes(!) at times. Here’s the full story of how they investigated and resolved the problem, making JS memory analysis faster than ever for all of us.

José Dapena Paz (Igalia)

ASIDES:

• If you’re using Node 14 on Vercel, this is your reminder that Vercel is discontinuing Node 14 support in just two weeks. Node 16 users get until next February to complete the switch – if you want to keep deploying your code, at least.

• The Node.js team is celebrating 🐦 a ‘long-term infrastructure transition’ of the official Node site using Next.js and Vercel. Can we see any differences? Beyond some RSS feeds that broke overnight, no. But that’s probably the point.

• There are some anticipated Node.js security releases on August 8 to address seven security issues of varying severity.

• A social engineering campaign that targets tech employees has been spreading through npm malware, claims Feross Aboukhadijeh of Socket.

• Publishing with npm provenance from private source repositories is no longer supported, says GitHub.

Ten Reasons to Attend Temporal’s Replay Conference — Thinking of attending Replay, Temporal’s annual backend engineering conference? Here are 10 reasons for you to consider.

Temporal Technologies sponsor

Wasp: A Fresh Way to Build Full Stack React + Node.js Apps — If you’d like to get a bit more structure around building full-stack webapps, Wasp offers a Rails-like framework atop React, Node.js and Prisma. The team is doing lots of interesting stuff, as demonstrated by their very active blog, including building a GPT-powered code agent to generate full-stack webapps using the framework. GitHub repo.

wasp-lang Team

Migrating a TypeScript App from Node to Bun

John Reilly

🛠 Code & Tools

Enquirer: Stylish, Intuitive and User-Friendly CLI Prompts — A popular and long standing way to render fast, lightweight, and practical prompts for command line apps, whether it’s simple text entry, quizzing, toggles, passwords, or more (complete with code samples).

Enquirer

Ora 7.0: An Elegant Terminal Spinner — Something else to make your CLI apps look a little better.

Sindre Sorhus

Crawlee 3.5: Web Scraping and Browser Automation Library — A mature library for Web crawling and scraping tasks. Here’s the quick start guide.

Apify

Hackathon Starter 8.0: A Boilerplate for Node Web Apps — For when you might want to start building a Node app quickly (like at a hackathon, say) including key features like auth/OAuth, Bootstrap 5, account management, email forms..

Sahat Yalkabov

node-tlds: Yep, It’s a List of (Up to Date) Domain TLDs — If you want a list of every valid TLD easily available in Node, this is for you.

Stephen Mathieson

QUICK RELEASES:

• YouTube.js 5.8
  ↳ Library to use the private YouTube API.

• Octokit.js 3.1
  ↳ ‘All-batteries-included’ GitHub SDK.

• eta (η) 3.1
  ↳ Embedded JS template engine. Now with Bun support.

• NestJS Telegraf 2.7
  ↳ A way to create Telegram bots with NestJS.

• Fastify 4.21
  ↳ Popular Node.js web framework.

• LDAPts 6.0
  ↳ LDAP client library.

• Derby 2.2
  ↳ The MVC framework.

• MQTT.js 5.0