#​584 — April 8, 2022

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Veni, vidi, formatae! Announcing Rome Formatter: Super Fast JavaScript Formatting — Rome is an ambitious project that sets out to replace a lot of JS tools in one hit. But Rome wasn’t built in a day, so they’re unveiling their take on Prettier-esque code formatting first. You can use it from the CLI but they’re recommending this VS Code extension primarily as a way to get a taste.

Rome Team

Writing Redux Reducers in Rust — We often cover how Rust is worming its way into numerous JavaScript areas (e.g. Rome, above!) but this is an interesting one: using Rust to write complex functions that are compiled down to WASM and used in a React/Redux app.

Arend van Beelen

Wallaby.js: 15x Faster JavaScript/jest Testing and Debugging — Wallaby runs your tests immediately as you type, with runtime values, errors and code coverage displayed in real-time right next to your code. Features have been designed specifically for testing, including new smart start which only runs test files you are currently working on.

Wallaby.js sponsor

JavaScript & Node Testing Best Practices: 2022 Edition — Fifty best practices divided into categories (testing, backend, frontend, etc.) complete with simple examples. We first linked to this 2½ years ago, but a new edition is now out, updated for 2022 standards and with translations in seven other languages including Chinese, Spanish and French.

Yoni Goldberg

Announcing RedwoodJS 1.0 and $1M Funding — Tom, formerly a co-founder of GitHub, announces the 1.0 release of RedwoodJS, a full-stack framework perhaps originally best associated with the Jamstack but is essentially a React and GraphQL-powered framework for building whatever apps you’d like.

Tom Preston-Werner

🇺🇦 Devs For Ukraine: An Online Event to Support Ukraine — Well known names including Addy Osmani, Cassidy Williams, Dan Abramov, and Sandi Metz are coming together on April 25-26 with some great (online) talks to help raise funds for Ukraine-related causes.

Remote

IN BRIEF:

• The British government has removed jQuery as a dependency from its gov.uk frontend apps – Matt Hobbs shows off how this improves performance significantly.

• If you use AWS Lambda for running serverless functions, you can now get direct HTTPS URLs for triggering functions, rather than having to use API Gateway. Serverless Framework already supports them too. (→ via Serverless Status)

• Node 12.22.12 (LTS) is out and it's the last Node 12 ever 👋 Node 17.9.0 (Current) is also out, but is a minor release.

• Almost a third of the top 35 npm packages remain at risk due to a lack of 2FA use by associated accounts.

• A developer makes the argument that JavaScript is safer for programming with integers than modern C – it's no April Fool.

RELEASES:

Astro 1.0 Beta
React Native 0.68
Mapbox GL JS 2.8 – Fast maps in the browser.
Swiper 8.1 – Powerful mobile touch slider.
Danfo 1.1 – Pandas-inspired data processing lib.
Cucumber.js 8.0 – BDD for JavaScript.
pkg 5.6.0 – Package Node apps into executables.

📒 Articles & Tutorials

ShadowRealms: An ECMAScript Proposal for a Better eval() — Sat at stage 3, the fantastically named ShadowRealm API proposal lays out a new way to execute arbitrary JS code within a separate context to the current one.

Dr. Axel Rauschmayer

The Problems with JavaScript Begin with JavaScript — We love JS because of its flexibility and ease of use, but we ignore its security vulnerabilities. Get the guide on how to start with JavaScript security.

Feroot sponsor

How TypeScript's Compiler Compiles — Short and sweet but the diagrams are fab.

Huy Tran

The Ultimate Guide on Creating Customizable Angular Components — Covers lots of areas including best practices, anti-patterns, global styles, mixins, CSS variable usage, and more.

Kevin Kreuzer

How to Test Component Interactions with Storybook — A walk through a component testing workflow when you want to simulate and verify user behavior.

Varun Vachhar

▶  Postlight Podcast: For Technology Leaders Solving Tough Problems

Postlight sponsor

How Are Windows Runtime GUIDs Represented in JavaScript? — It's a small thing, but it's not often Microsoft's code archaeologist (his blog is packed with Windows trivia) mentions JavaScript.

Raymond Chen (Microsoft)

A Built-in Test Runner is Coming to Node and Why You Should Care
Shehzad Akbar

Build Your Own Markdown Editor with React and Codemirror 6
0xsuk

🛠 Code & Tools

⭐️ React Libraries to Use in 2022 — The React ecosystem is so extensive that we even have a separate newsletter for React stuff and when it comes to libraries, the problem is one of too much choice, not too little, so an opinionated list like this can come in handy.

Robin Wieruch

AgnosticUI: A Component Library for Numerous Frameworks — A set of components currently supporting React, Vue 3, Svelte and Angular, but you can make them work from vanilla JavaScript too. Some examples.

Rob Levin

Preview.js: Preview UI Components Instantly in Your IDE — Namely, VS Code or JetBrain IDEs, out of the box. Compatible with components built for React and Vue.

Zenc Labs Pty

Keep Up with the Latest in Startups, Tech, & Programming in Just 5 Min — TLDR is a daily newsletter with links and TLDRs of the most interesting stories in startups 🚀, tech 📱, and coding 💻

TLDR Newsletter sponsor

JSZip 3.9: Create, Read and Edit .zip Archive Files — A simple and elegant API. The homepage is pretty cool as it has a live demo and a handy how-to. Or you can just go for the GitHub repo.

Stuart Knightley

article-parser: Node Library to Extract Articles from Web Pages — Give this a URL and, fingers crossed, you can get some useful content back. Live demo. You may not be surprised to know Readability is used under the hood to make most of this work :-)

Dong Nguyen

Cornerstone.js: Libraries to Build Web-Based Medical Imaging Apps
Open Health Imaging Foundation

rc-collapse: A Collapsing Content/Accordion Component for React
react-component

📥 Reader Submissions

• Cory Brown is happy to stir up a little controversy when he explains why he avoids async/await – it certainly provoked a lot of comments.

• Antonio Villagra De La Cruz wanted to submit his entire blog but given one of today's featured items, we thought we'd pick Optimizing a JS library with WebAssembly - a failed attempt to link :-)

• The folks over at Cypress (best known as a Web testing tool) launched a four-course curriculum on Real World Testing with Cypress – all open source too.

• Maksim Balabash collected together just some of the npm supply chain issues over the past year into one place.

• Pete Matsy sent in Reliable Webhook, a GUI-based tool for debugging webhooks. It's billed as 'charityware' with donations encouraged to the Come Back Alive fund for Ukraine.