What’s next for Node.js?

#​386 — April 29, 2021

Read on the Web

🖋 Just in case you missed last week’s issue, it was a big one as Node 16 was released so it’s worth a catch up 🙂 This week is somewhat quieter but a few neat things have been coming in..
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Peter Cooper, your editor

Node Weekly

How to Use ECMAScript Modules in Node — Even the Node docs note that ES modules are the ‘official standard format’ for packaging and reusing JavaScript code, and with more developers switching from CommonJS to ESM, it’s time to look at what’s involved.

Dmitri Pavlutin

▶  What’s Next? The Future of Node.js — A 27-minute session by Red Hat and IBM’s Joe Sepi, Michael Dawson and Bethany Griggs on tracking what’s coming up in the Node world, Node’s future (though Beth reminds us “there is no roadmap”) and how you can get involved if you so wish.

NearForm

Optimize Node.js Application Performance Metrics in Real-Time — Debug and optimize your code by tracing requests across web servers, databases, and services in your environment. Correlate between distributed request traces, metrics, and logs to troubleshoot issues and enhance performance. Try Datadog APM free.

Datadog APM sponsor

Do You Use Node for Scripting Instead of

? — A discussion over on the Lobsters community with some bits and pieces. Experiences vary, and some people move to Deno, Ruby or Python for scripting even if they are Node developers too.

Lobsters

tinyhttp 1.3: A Tiny Web Framework as a Replacement for Express — A modern ‘zero legacy’ Express-like web framework written in TypeScript and compiled to native ESM, that uses a bare minimum amount of dependencies. They’re working on a Deno port too. Project homepage.

v1rtl

QUICK BITS:

• The AWS SDK for JavaScript will no longer support any Node version under 10.x as of November this year.
• Alex Hultman doesn’t seem to be a fan of either Node or Deno but claims Node is still the faster of the two.

📗 Tutorials and Stories

My Favorite Microservice Design Patterns for Node — “After working for a while with Node.js I’ve come to the conclusion that there is no better tool to use when writing microservices.”

Fernando Doglio

How to Find Unused

Dependencies —

will do the trick and Josh demonstrates what it does here.

Josh Sherman

Observability Won’t Replace Monitoring (Because It Shouldn’t)

Lightstep sponsor

▶  Building a Realtime Chat App with React, Node.js, and Socket.io — The end result looks a lot like Facebook Messenger.

Lama Dev

▶  You Need To See These ES12 (ECMAScript 2021) Features — It’s not too many months away now.. Or, if you prefer, a written look at such features.

Catalin Pit

Build An HTTPS-Intercepting JavaScript Proxy in 30 Seconds Flat

Tim Perry

How to Use Binary UUIDs in Prisma

Ivan Borshchov

Ask HN: Is Learning Go Worth It If You Know Node?

Hacker News

Foal: A TypeScript-Based All-Inclusive Web Framework for Node — The idea here is ‘batteries included’ with a CLI tool, testing tools, frontend utilities, authentication, ORM, GraphQL and Swagger support, and more. GitHub repo.

FoalTS

ioredis 4.27: A Performance Focused Redis Client for Node — Boasts support for Redis Cluster, Sentinel, pipelining, Lua scripting, pub/sub, etc, as well as ES6 types like

and

.

子骅

A Node Wrapper for the Tesseract OCR API — Tesseract is a mature OCR project that’s now 36 years old and was open sourced in 2005. This latest release adds support for streams.

zapolnoch

Book a Demo. Ship Fast. Rest Easy. LaunchDarkly — Testing in production is scary until it’s not. Get control of your code to reduce risk & reclaim your nights and weekends.

LaunchDarkly sponsor

functions-differ: Deploy Only the Firebase Functions That Changed — Selectively deploy only the Firebase Functions that changed in your project.

Kshitij Chauhan

snakecase-keys: Convert an Object’s Keys to snake_case — Going from keys

to

.

Ben Drucker

pkg 5.1.0: Package Your Node Project Into an Executable — Brought up to Node 16 standards.

Vercel