Dev News: Web Push, Nuxt’s New DevTools and a Boon for Rust

The big news for web and frontend developers this week? Apple added Web Push to any web apps added to the home screen on iOS and iPadOS 16.4. The standard is now supported on all three major browsers.

Web Push makes it possible for web developers to send push notifications to their users through the use of Push API, Notifications API and Service Workers, according to WebKit’s blog. WebKit is the web browser engine used by Safari, Mail, App Store, and many other apps on macOS, iOS, and Linux.

“Deeply integrated with iOS and iPadOS, Web Push notifications from web apps work exactly like notifications from other apps,” the post said. “They show on the Lock Screen, in Notification Center, and on a paired Apple Watch.”

Nuxt Releases New DevTools

In other news, Nuxt released a minor version v0.3.0 of its Nuxt DevTools, a new tool to help developers understand Nuxt apps and to improve the developer experience. The tool previously debuted in February in a preview at Vue Amsterdam 2023. It is shipped as an experimental module, the blog post noted.

Anthony Fu, a framework developer at NuxtLabs, explained that the changes were needed to address a growing Nuxt problem: As abstraction increased with Nuxt 3, so did Nuxt’s lack of transparency.

“This might be considered as a trade-off of any tools, you have to learn and understand the tool to use it with efficiency,” Fu wrote. “Despite improving the documentation and providing more examples, we believe in an opportunity to improve the lack of transparency.”

Nuxt DevTools is a visual tool that addresses the problem by helping devs manage the app and configurations. It also will help identify performance bottlenecks. It starts with an overview tab and drills down to the following detailed tabs:

• Pages reveals current routes and provides a way to navigate to them;
• Components shows the components you are using in your app and where they are from, allowing developers to search for them and go to the source code;
• Imports shows all the auto-imports registered to Nuxt and which files are importing them, as well s where they are from;
• Modules shows all the modules devs have installed and providing the links to their documentation and source code;
• Assets shares all the static assets and their information;
• Plugins shows all the plugins at use in the app;
• Hooks monitors the time spent in each hook from both client and server side, as well as allowing devs to see how many listeners registered to each hook, and how many times they have been invoked;
• App Config allows inspection and modification of the app config in DevTools. Developers can try different configurations and see the effects immediately;
• Payload and Data shows the state created by useState, useAsyncData and useFetch. For useAsyncData and useFetch, developers can also manually trigger the refetch;
• Terminals allows developers to monitor and isolate subprocesses and outputs;
• Virtual Files shows the virtual files generated by Nuxt and Nitro to support the conventions;
• Inspect exposes the vite-plugin-inspect integration, allowing developers to inspect the transformation steps of Vite, which can help developers see how each plugin is transforming their code;
• VS Code; and
• Module Contributed View, which enables three further drill-down views on modules.

There’s also an installation guide.

Rust Added to List of Safer Languages

Rust received another security accolade this week, this time from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), the nation’s oldest physical science lab.

NIST added Rust to its list of safer languages this month, as part of its Software Assurance Metrics and Tools Evaluation project, which is devoted to software assurance and new methods for evaluating it. Rust was added because its ownership model “guarantees both memory safety and thread safety, at compile-time, without requiring a garbage collector,” according to the Rust Foundation announcement on Monday. “NIST points out that Rust ‘allows users to write high-performance code while eliminating many bug classes,’ and while Rust does have an ‘unsafe’ mode, the institute explains that risk is mitigated through the narrow scope of actions allowed,” the statement added.

Founded in 1901, NIST and is part of the federal Department of Commerce.