InfoQ Homepage Web Development Content on InfoQ
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Chrome 74 Natively Supports Lazy Loading
Google recently released Google Chrome 74 with a new experimental flag to enable native lazy loading support for images and iframes. The img and iframe HTML tags get an additional loading attribute to configure the lazy loading behaviour of the corresponding resource. Deferring load of non-visible content may reduce data usage, memory usage, and speed up above-the-fold content.
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Iconic Doom3 Game Now in Browsers with WebAssembly: Q&A with Gabriel Cuvillier
The iconic Doom 3 game now runs in browsers with WebAssembly. The port illustrated both the present performance potential and the missing parts for WebAssembly today to seamlessly run heavy-weight desktop applications and games. InfoQ interviewed Cuvillier on technical challenges and lessons to be learnt for developers thinking about porting desktop applications with WebAssembly.
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Babel 7.5: Dynamic Import, Pipeline Operator and More
The recently released Babel 7.5 can now parse and transpile F# pipelines and dynamic imports. Babel 7.5 additionally has experimental support for TypeScript namespaces.
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Vue 3.0 Discards Class-Based API for Reusable, Composable Function-Based Approach
The Vue team recently opened an RFC describing the function-based component API for the upcoming Vue 3. Like React Hooks, the function-based component API allows developers to encapsulate logic into “composition functions” and reuse that logic to build larger components. The new component API provides better TypeScript type inference support, in ways that the now discarded Class API RFC cannot.
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Angular 8, an Incremental Improvement to the Angular Framework
The Angular team recently released Angular 8, the latest major release of its single page application framework. This release includes a large number of bug fixes, several incremental improvements including differential loading, and a preview for both the Ivy render engine, and the Bazel build system.
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Google Earth Ported to Browsers with WebAssembly
The Google Earth team recently released a beta preview of a WebAssembly port of Google Earth. The new port runs in Chrome and other Chromium-based browsers, including Edge (Canary version) and Opera, as well as Firefox. The port thus brings cross-browser support to the existing Earth For Web version, which uses the native C++ codebase and Chrome’s Native Client (NaCl) technology.
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Making 'npm install' Safe
At QCon New York 2019, Kate Sills, a software engineer at Agoric, discussed some of the security challenges in building composable smart contract components with JavaScript. Two emerging TC39 JavaScript proposals, realms and Secure ECMAScript (SES) were presented as solutions to security risks with the npm installation process.
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Front End Architecture in a World of AI
At QCon New York 2019, front end software engineer Thijs Bernolet of Oqton explained some of the challenges in creating front end architectures influenced by machine learning.
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Ionic Capacitor: Creating Native Applications with JavaScript
Capacitor is a new development framework by Ionic for hybrid application creation. Capacitor provides an alternative to Apache Cordova, a well-established solution first released in 2009.
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Sucrase, a Faster Babel for Modern JS Runtimes
The Sucrase JavaScript/TypeScript compiler aims at providing significantly faster development builds than the Babel compiler. Faster builds mean faster iterations, specially when testing on a large codebase. Some empirical measures show a gain in speed between 4x and 20x vs. Babel. Developers may thus enjoy the improved developer experience in development, and still resort to Babel in production.
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W3C and FIDO Alliance Finalized WebAuthn, Web Standard for Secure, Passwordless Logins
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and the Fast IDentity Online (FIDO) Alliance recently announced that the Web Authentication (WebAuthn) specification is now an official web standard. WebAuthn allows users to log in via biometrics, mobile devices and/or FIDO security keys, with higher security over passwords alone.
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@Pika/web Frees Modern Web Development from the Complexity of Package Bundling
@pika/web, part of the pika tool chain, aims at improving web application developers' experience by turning often-complex bundling processes into an opt-in feature. With @pika/web, developers can run `npm` packages directly in the browser. Bundlers, like Browserify, Webpack or import maps, may be used but are no longer required.
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TypeScript 3.5 Adds Omit Type, Smarter Union Type Checking
The TypeScript team has announced the release of TypeScript 3.5, including type checking performance improvements and a new Omit type.
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The Polymer Project Releases Lit-Html and LitElement for Performance-Focused Web Components
The Polymer Project recently released lit-html v1.0 together with LitElement v2.0. lit-html is a light-weight, extensible HTML templating JavaScript library. LitElement is a JavaScript library to create lightweight, optimized-for-performance web components. The created web components can then be used in any framework or no framework to build web applications.
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Ionic Introduces Stencil One, Targeting Fast, Reusable UI Components and Apps
The Ionic Framework’s new “Stencil One” compiles to optimized Web Components and progressive web apps. Developers may write a component once, and reuse it in any framework – Angular, React, Vue, Ember or with plain vanilla JavaScript, by adjusting the Stencil compiler options. Stencil One also provides pre-rendering, automatic component documentation, Hot Module and Style Replacement, and more.