An easy way to experiment with signals

April 11, 2024 By Mark Otto Off

Frontend Development Beyond React: Svelte — A surprisingly thorough article going deep into one developer’s research into using Svelte to build modern front-end apps. If you’ve never experimented with Svelte, this is a good primer to the key concepts, tradeoffs, and techniques involved.

Héla Ben Khalfallah

Add Excel-Like Spreadsheet Functionality to Your JavaScript Apps — SpreadJS is the industry-leading JavaScript spreadsheet for adding advanced spreadsheet features to your enterprise apps. Build finance, analysis, budget, and other apps. Excel I/O, 500+ calc functions, tables, charts, and more. View demos now.

SpreadJS from MESCIUS inc

zx v8.0: Write Better Shell Scripts with Node — A popular way to make shell scripting a more pleasant experience in Node with useful wrappers around child_process, argument escaping, and sensible defaults. v8.0 makes zx 20x smaller, faster, makes it easier to kill processes, pass input to commands & more.

Google

IN BRIEF:

RELEASES:

📒 Articles & Tutorials

On Developing Figma Plugins — Some interesting observations on the experience of creating Figma plugins in JavaScript, including how they’re sandboxed and some implementation details of the author’s own plugin.

Tom MacWright

React Server Components in a Nutshell — A quick overview of RSCs not all about Next.js, comparing the approach taken by several frameworks before sharing thoughts on the tech and why the smaller Waku framework is worth a look.

Paul Scanlon (The New Stack)

Some DevTools Tips and Tricks — Most developers barely scratch the surface of what DevTools can accomplish, says the author, who shares ten tips here.

Pankaj Parashar

🛠 Code & Tools

PythonMonkey: A JavaScript Engine in the Python VM — If you need to use Python but also want to run JavaScript, this gives you a way to do it with the Mozilla SpiderMonkey JS engine embedded into the Python runtime with Python providing the host environment.

Distributive

Color.js 0.5: ‘Let’s Get Serious About Color’ — A fantastic library for working with colors in the browser, following the latest specs. It’s even been used by browsers to test their CSS Color 4/5 implementations.

Lea Verou and Chris Lilley

  • Mikro ORM 6.2 – TypeScript ORM for Node.js based on Data Mapper. SQL Server and libSQL/Turso join the list of supported databases.

  • Rspack 0.6 – Fast Rust-based web bundler.

  • Pixi.js 8.1 – The fast WebGL and WebGPU 2D graphics engine switches back to WebGL by default due to immature browser support.

  • Jotai 2.8 – Simple, flexible state management for React.

  • DOMPurify 2.5 – Fast, tolerant XSS sanitizer for HTML and SVG.

  • Reveal.js 5.1 – Framework for building presentations in HTML.

  • Xterm.js 5.5 – Create terminal experiences on the Web.

  • TIFF 6.0 – Pure JS TIFF image decoder.

  • Shiki 1.3 – Powerful syntax highlighter.

🛞 It’s wheely good..

Remember the iPod’s click wheel? It’s back. In JavaScript form!