The projects that shaped JavaScript in 2024
January 10, 2025|
🗓️ Friday is the new Thursday! If you were a JavaScript Weekly reader several years ago, you might remember it always landed on Fridays and after getting caught out by a variety of big news items landing on Thursdays in recent years, we’re back 😉 |
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⭐ 2024’s JavaScript Rising Stars — It’s time to fully wave goodbye to 2024, but not before Michael Rambeau’s annual analysis of which JavaScript projects fared best on GitHub over the past year. Even if you dislike GitHub stars as a metric for anything, this remains a great way to get a feel for the JavaScript ecosystem and see what libraries and tools have mindshare in a variety of niches. A fantastic roundup as always. Michael Rambeau |
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A Look at Import Attributes — It’s always a pleasure to see Dr. Axel blogging about JavaScript again, and he’s back with one of his typical deep dives into a newer ECMAScript feature: import attributes. This feature provides an inline syntax for attaching metadata to module imports such as for importing non-JavaScript modules (e.g. JSON, WASM or CSS). Dr. Axel Rauschmayer |
How to Enable End-to-End Testing with Synthetic Monitoring — Synthetic Monitoring helps you launch new features with confidence and speed. Learn how you can create robust end-to-end test suites, spend less time on false positives, and proactively catch errors before they get to production. Datadog |
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RELEASES:
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📒 Articles & Tutorials |
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The Future of htmx — htmx is an increasingly popular way to enhance HTML and actually write less JavaScript on the frontend. This post reflects on how htmx would like to be ‘the new jQuery’, not least in the sense that one of the project’s goals is to push the ideas of htmx into the HTML standard itself, as in this set of proposals. Gross and Petros |
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You Don’t Need Next.js — As much as Next.js is considered the React meta-framework of choice, if your requirements are modest, simply going with plain React offers numerous benefits in terms of simplicity and speed, as seen here. Benny Kok |
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Using TypeScript Without Build Tools — Chris Coyier enjoys the benefits of TypeScript while developing, but actually compiling it to JavaScript in various scenarios is less endearing. We’ve learnt (above) that Node can now run Chris Coyier |
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🛠 Code & Tools |
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🎁 And one for fun? |
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I’ll let you decide if this one is fun or frightening! Whether or not this will work depends on your PDF reader or browser support, but it works with Chrome and Firefox, at least. The PDF document format supports embedded JavaScript and this experiment uses it to implement a game of Tetris. The developer, Thomas Rinsma, has used Python to output the PostScript that includes the game’s JavaScript. Couple that with the fact many browser PDF renderers are themselves implemented in JavaScript (e.g. PDF.js) and you have a veritable Matryoshka doll of technologies at play here. |
