InfoQ Homepage Web Development Content on InfoQ
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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.
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Electron 4 and 5 Releases Add Security and Modern Web APIs
The Electron team recently announced the release of version 4 and version 5 of Electron. Electron maintains an aggressive release cycle to stay current with the latest updates from Chromium, V8, and Node.js. Significant updates in these versions include better control over remotes and requests, and an in-progress initiative to update Electron's callback-based APIs to use promises.
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Writing Web Applications in Java - a Study of Alternatives
Developers familiar with the Java Virtual Machine languages and who want to develop web applications without the difficulties of a JavaScript development stack, have an increasing array of alternatives to JavaScript to choose from. The performance penalty vs. native JavaScript web applications is shrinking.
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Node.js 12 Release Improves Security, Performance, and Modules
The Node.js project recently released Node.js version 12, adding improvements through its underlying V8 JavaScript engine, startup performance, ES6 modules, and more.
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Porting JQ, Command-Line JSON Processor, to the Browser with WebAssembly - Q&A with Robert Aboukhali
jq, the command-line JSON processor, originally written in C, has recently been ported to WebAssembly, and is now available in a browser JavaScript environment. InfoQ talked with Robert Aboukhalil, bioinformatics software engineer at Invitae, about the challenges of porting existing software to WebAssembly and the ensuing benefits for developers.
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Svelte 3 Front-End Framework Moves Reactivity into the JavaScript Language, Q&A with Rich Harris
The recently released front-end framework Svelte 3 introduces a new syntax to express reactivity in JavaScript. InfoQ interviewed Rich Harris, Svelte creator, and discussed what Svelte 3 means and its implications for developers.