Oracle engages its lawyers and JavaScript turns 29

December 5, 2024 By Mark Otto Off

πŸ—“οΈ If you missed last week’s issue, don’t worry, it didn’t exist – we took a week off for Thanksgiving! We’re now back all the way through to the Christmas break πŸ™‚
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Your editor, Peter Cooper

Deno v. Oracle: Cancelling the JavaScript Trademark β€” Did you know Oracle formally owns the β€˜JavaScript’ trademark? There have been a few efforts to change this over the years but Oracle isn’t listening, so the Deno team formally filed a petition to cancel the trademark.

Deno

βš–οΈ And, as of this week, it looks like Oracle is lawyering up to defend it [PDF].

πŸŽ‚ JavaScript Turns 29 Years Old β€” If you’re wondering why Oracle has the JavaScript trademark, it’s because Sun owned the name and Oracle acquired Sun (which is also why it owns Java). As someone who was posting inane questions in comp.lang.javascript in 1996, this news makes me feel old – no-one could have anticipated what JavaScript would be today.

Netscape and Sun Microsystems

Add Excel-like Spreadsheet Functionality to Your JavaScript Apps β€” 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

Astro 5.0: The Web Framework for Content-Driven Sites β€” Astro has taken the front-end world by storm and v5.0 keeps up its rapid pace of development. Content Layer makes it easy to load content from any source and Server Islands can combine cached, static content with dynamic content. There’s now a type-safe way to manage environment variables and Vite 6 is along for the ride too. You can play with Astro 5 using the astro.new site.

The Astro Team

πŸ“’ Articles & Tutorials

Working with JavaScript’s Scheduler API β€” A look at an API only available in Chromium/Edge for now, but that promises a way to prioritize and control task execution in a more refined way than was possible till now.

Trevor I. Lasn

β–Ά  Building a Teleprompter App in 30 Minutes with AI β€” Building apps with AI powered tools isn’t unusual nowadays, but if you’ve never been through the process, this is a good look at how it works all the way through to deployment.

Kilian Ekamp

πŸ›  Code & Tools

  • 🐍 PythonMonkey 1.1 – Embed the SpiderMonkey JS engine into Python’s VM.

  • nrm 1.5 – Fast switching between registries: npm, cnpm, nj, taobao.

  • LogTape 0.8 – Simple logging library for all major JS runtimes.

  • Faker 9.3 – Generate fabricated data to your heart’s content.

  • np 10.1 – A better npm publish. Now supports Bun too.

  • DOCX 9.1 – Generate .docx / Word files from JavaScript.

  • Preact 10.25 – The 3KB React-compatible alternative.