InfoQ Homepage Web Development Content on InfoQ
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Typescript 4.2 Released, Improves Types and Developer Experience
The TypeScript team announced the release of TypeScript 4.2, which features more flexible type annotations, stricter checks, extra configuration options, and a few breaking changes. Tuple types now allow rest arguments in any position (instead of only in last position). Type aliases are no longer expanded in type error messages, providing a better developer experience.
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Newly Refactored Vue.js Builder Vite 2.0 Still Focuses on Speed; Is Now Framework-Agnostic
Evan You, the creator of the Vue.js front-end framework, recently released a new major iteration of Vite, a build tool that focuses on build speed and short feedback loops. Vite 2.0 is a complete refactoring of the previous version around a framework-agnostic core. Vite 2.0 features a new plugin format and improved programmatic API that strive to make it easy to build new tools on top of Vite.
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How Using Modern JavaScript May Improve Performance
Houssein Djirdeh and Jason Miller recently explained at the Chrome Developer Summit 2020 how modern JavaScript may shorten the size and improve the performance of web applications. The estimator.dev website provides Google’s estimation of the potential savings and suggests plugins that help materialize those savings.
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Testing Asynchronous Code - RxJS Live London
Jay Phelps, former member of the RxJS core team, recently explained how to test code that leverages code using RxJS, the reactive programming library used by the Angular front-end framework for asynchronous programming. RxJS provides a testing API with a DSL to express timed sequences and lifecycle events.
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Serverless React Applications with AWS Lambda
Roman Boiko, solutions architect at AWS, recently published three scenarios to deploy a React application in the cloud or at the edge making use of Amazon Web Services. The scenarios use Amazon S3, Amazon CloudFront, Amazon API Gateway, AWS Lambda, and Lambda@Edge for a fully serverless implementation.
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Vue 3 Experiments with Native CSS Variables Template Integration
Vue 3 shipped in September last year in what was a huge release that followed two years of work. Vue developers can now declaratively describe in single-file component templates how component state relates to component style. The experimental feature relies on CSS variables, a native feature in modern browsers, that has been used to implement framework-independent design systems.
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Better SEO with Structured Data and Rich Snippets
Martin Splitt, search developer advocate for Google, recently explained at the Chrome Developer Summit 2020 how to use structured data to make a website eligible for rich results in Google Search. Rich results support semantic searches, stand out from ordinary search results, and may increase the click-through rate.
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WebdriverIO 7 Rewritten in Typescript, Released with Improved Lighthouse Integration
The browser and mobile automation test framework WebdriverIO recently released a major update. Webdriver IO 7 is now written with TypeScript. TypeScript users may thus need to update their types, while JavaScript users should be largely unaffected. The new version also drops support for Node v10, upgrades the used Cucumber version to v7, and integrates better with Google Lighthouse.
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The Preact Team Releases WMR to Simplify Modern Web App Development
Jason Miller, creator of 3KB Preact alternative to React, recently released WMR, a *tiny all-in-one development tool for modern web apps*. WMR, in a single 2MB file with no dependencies, supports importing npm packages without prior installation, and many of the productivity and production features customary to developers (e.g, hot module reloading, JSX, CSS modules, TypeScript, and more).
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Npm 7 Now Generally Available, Supports Workspaces and Deterministic Builds
The recently released npm 7 adds several features requested by developers, e.g. support for workspaces, better support for peer-dependency management, or deterministically reproducible builds. npm 7 is a big release that includes several breaking changes aiming at improving the overall developer experience.
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Deno Now Compiles to Self-Contained, Standalone Binaries
Deno 1.6 introduced the compilation of Deno projects into standalone executables, whose size Deno 1.7 further reduced (up to 60%). Deno now has a dedicated language server that seeks to improve the experience of Deno developers in code editors. Deno also added support for data URLs, enabling the execution of computer-generated code.
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Snowpack 3 Build Tool Further Streamlines Modern Front-End Development
The third major iteration of the Snowpack front-end build tool was recently shipped with pre-bundled streaming imports, integrated build optimizations, and JavaScript/Node APIs. Snowpack 3 won the 2020 JS Open Source’s developer productivity boost award and ranks at the top of developer interest and satisfaction in the 2020 State of JS survey.
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New Rust-Based JavaScript Tool Manager to Simplify CLI Management with Global Installs
Volta, a new JavaScript tool manager, recently released its first stable version. Volta installs CLI tools globally while locally storing version information. Like nvm for Node, Volta enables having multiple versions of the same tool installed, without having to worry about switching versions when switching projects. Rust-based Volta ships as a native, fast binary with no external dependencies.
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The "Wasmer" WebAssembly Runtime is Generally Available
Wasmer recently released version 1.0 of its server-side WebAssembly runtime, and it is now generally available. Wasmer enables super lightweight containers based on WebAssembly. Version 1.0 marks a significant milestone on a journey, which started more than two years ago with version 0.1.0. It is an indicator of the growing interest in WebAssembly on the server-side.
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Yari, the New MDN Web Documentation Platform
Mozilla Developer Network (MDN), Mozilla’s multilingual resource for web documentation, recently launched Yari, MDN Web Docs’ new platform. Yari reduces the burden of developing, maintaining, and contributing to MDN. MDN content is now stored in GitHub and can be contributed to via pull requests.