~javascriptweekly | Bookmarks (220)

jscanify 1.3: JavaScript Document Scanning Library — Given raw photos of documents, this can do paper detection (along with glare suppression), distortion correction, highlighting and extracting. See some visual examples or try it out here.

Things People Get Wrong About Electron — A long-time maintainer of the wildly successful Electron cross-platform app framework stands by the technical choices Electron has made over the years and defends it against some of the more common criticisms here.

Standard Schema: A Common Interface to Schema / Validation Libraries — From the creators of Zod, Valibot and ArkType comes a fantastic bit of collaboration to define a common interface to use JavaScript and TypeScript schema libraries.

JavaScript: The Hard Parts — Take your knowledge to the next level with the most loved JavaScript course in the industry. Deepen your understanding of the most important aspects of JavaScript. This highly rated video course goes under the hood, looking at callbacks, higher-order functions, object-oriented JS, and more.

Announcing TypeScript 5.8 Beta — It’s that time again. What’s new? Support for using require() for ES modules in Node 22+, checked returns for conditional and indexed access types, startup and building optimizations & more. While not a huge release overall, it's particularly good for Node devs.

The Modern Way to Write JavaScript Servers — The irony is that while Node popularized JavaScript on the server (though Netscape was doing it in the 90s) this modern, standardized cross-runtime approach doesn’t work on Node ...yet ;-)

Introducing Mentoss: The fetch Mocker — A new approach to mocking global fetch() calls (in both browsers and server-side runtimes) inspired by previous attempts like Nock and MSW.

Wish Your AI Co-Pilot Actually Knew Your Codebase? — Try the most context-aware Developer AI. Augment deeply understands your codebase, documentation, and dependencies.

docxtemplater: Generate docx and pptx Documents from Templates — Generate Word and PowerPoint files dynamically by merging against templates (ideal for invoices, contracts, certificates, etc.) It’s open source (MIT or GPLv3), but the creator has a commercial version with more extensions (e.g. to work with Excel). GitHub repo and feature demos.

📊 Plotly 3.0: A JavaScript Graphing Library — A high-level, declarative charting library, built on top of D3 and stack.gl, with over 40 chart types, including 3D charts, statistical graphs, and SVG maps. v3 is largely to remove deprecations, fix bugs, and a switch to esbuild.

Using Clerk SSO to Access Google Calendar and Other Service Data — Leverage Clerk’s social sign in providers to easily access service data on behalf of your users.

Emittery 1.1: A Simple, Modern Async Event Emitter — A small, async event emitter for Node and the browser, and now with support for AbortController.

🎶 Chiptune.js: Module / Tracker File Player — A library for playing ‘module’ music files like MOD, XM and S3M. (Demo.)

Bun 1.2: A Big Step Forward for the Fast JS/TS Runtime — The JavaScriptCore-based Bun continues to up its server-side runtime game with strides forward in Node.js compatibility, performance boosts, and new APIs for interacting with S3 and S3-like object stores as well as Postgres. If you’d prefer to be ▶️ introduced to Bun 1.2 with a keynote-style video, it's a good watch.

🤖 Transformers.js v3.3: Machine Learning and AI for the Web — This is a dry release announcement but I wanted to highlight the rapid pace that this exciting library is making for browser-based NLP, speech recognition, vision, and now text-to-speech use cases (live TTS demo here - it takes a while to load though). It’s also being used in Firefox for various enhancements (see below).

🕒 JavaScript Temporal is Coming (For Real!) — We first mentioned the Temporal API proposal providing a better way to handle dates and times in JavaScript almost five years ago (in issue 496!) but now it really is almost here. Brian explains its basic concepts and where initial support is starting to appear.

Avoiding anys with Linting and TypeScript — any is TypeScript’s famous type fallback/safety hatch but if you can avoid it, you can benefit more from TypeScript’s type-checking features. Josh shares some tips to do just that.

[Workshop] How to Build Testing Culture on Your Team — Join our live session to learn strategies for gaining buy-in, balancing testing, and integrating it into daily workflows.

🤖 Running Inference in Web Extensions — Firefox Nightly is shipping with a new API that can let you use their AI runtime for offline machine learning tasks in Web extensions you create. It uses the previously mentioned Transformers.js and is already used in Firefox 133 to provide alt text for images in PDFs.

deck.gl 9.1: GPU-Powered Large Scale Data Visualization — deck.gl provides a way to create complex yet high performance data visualizations composed of multiple layers (examples). It can be used in a vanilla JS way or through React components and it’s ready for WebGPU.

ArkType 2.0: Runtime Validation Library — An easy-to-deploy solution for schema validation that can infer TypeScript definitions 1:1 and use them as optimized validators for your data, both at runtime and for immediate type-level feedback in your editor.

NodeBB v4.0.0 Released: Node.js Powered Forums — Offers a classic forum experience in a modern Node.js-shaped guise. v4 adds support for federation between instances and the wider 'fediverse.'

SRCL: Build React Apps with 'Terminal Aesthetics' — The homepage is a live demonstration of what SRCL has to offer. It’s a suite of React components and styling to recreate a monospaced, terminal-like atmosphere

Revealed: React's Experimental Animations API — <ViewTransition /> is based on the browser's View Transition API. It’s only in pre-release versions of React, but Matt is armed with examples for you to get a feel for the potential.