☀️ We’re taking a rare week off next week for a brief summer vacation so there won’t be any issue on August 19 – we’ll be back on August 26, complete with |
Astro 1.0: The Fast Islands-Based Frontend Framework — Despite its relative youth, Astro has had a big impact already with a wide range of users and support for, well, almost every other framework or dev tool going. It’s based around ‘islands’ where fast HTML can stand in for components which can then be lazily loaded in as user interactions demand. 1.0 introduces new image and picture components, MDX/Markdown support, and SSR builds. There’s a new homepage too. Fred Schott |
Patterns.dev: Modern Web App Design Patterns — A free book you can download in PDF format or enjoy on the Web. Learn about lots of fundamentals, from how different styles of rendering or importing resources work to performance optimizations and case studies. There’s a lot to enjoy and a fantastic team behind it, too. Lydia Hallie, Addy Osmani, and Others |
IN BRIEF: |
RELEASES: Playwright 1.25.0 – Browser remote control and runner toolkit. |
📒 Articles & Tutorials |
‘How and Why We Removed jQuery from GOV.UK’ — We’ve mentioned the UK government digital team’s culling of jQuery in passing a few times this year, but now there’s a (brief) explanation of how it happened. Andy Sellick (GDS) |
How To Use Multithreading in Node.js — A practical walkthrough to how Node uses threads and how and why you might use worker threads yourself in a web app. Stanley Ulili (for DigitalOcean) |
Million 1.12: A Fast and Small Virtual DOM Implementation — Focused on performance and shipping at under 1KB compressed, Million is ideal if you want an agnostic VDOM implementation to use when building your own framework or just to go a little lower level. “Think of it as if React’s API and Svelte’s compiler had a baby.” Million |
OTHER QUICK RELEASES: Jayson 4.0 – JSON-RPC client/server for Node. |
|
If you’ve got a few minutes, ▶️ this video of a recent winning ‘demo’ from a demoscene contest is pretty mindblowing. The code was written in 2022, but is running on a 1981 IBM PC using CGA graphics and if you’re old enough to have used such a machine (like me!) it’s amazing what they’ve managed to squeeze out of it. As one commenter (Jeff Haluska) said: “I have been programming for about 25 years and Area 5150 has me questioning everything I know about computers.” |