InfoQ Homepage Web Development Content on InfoQ
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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.
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Proxx: Building Fast Web Applications
Proxx is a JavaScript game from the Google Chrome team. It demonstrates how to develop fast and smooth web applications that offer a similar user experience across multiple platforms and input devices.
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Microsoft Showcases Fluid Framework, a Web-Based Platform for Collaborative Document Creation
Microsoft recently announced its new Fluid Framework at its annual Build developers conference. Fluid Framework is a developer platform designed to let developers build highly-collaborative interactive services and applications on the web.
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Cloudflare Adopts Official CLI, Announces 3rd-Level Custom Domain Names, and Introduces a Free Tier
Cloudflare announces Wrangler as the official CLI for Cloudflare Workers, the ability to deploy without bringing your own domain, and a free tier that allows anyone to deploy globally on Cloudflare’s infrastructure.
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Pixi.js, HTML5 Alternative to Adobe Flash, Adds WebGL Support for Cross-Platform, Interactive Apps
PixiJS, a standard-based alternative to Adobe Flash, released its fifth major version with faster rendering and lower GPU utilization. PixiJS v5 abstracts WebGL features behind a new API which falls back to HTML5’s canvas if needed. Developers thus need not dive into the WebGL API or deal with device compatibility to create rich, interactive graphics, cross-platform applications, and games.