InfoQ Homepage JavaScript 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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@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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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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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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J2CL: A Java-to-JavaScript Transpiler
J2CL is a source-to-source compiler that converts Java to Javascript. It attempts to solve a different problem than similar Java-to-Javascript frameworks such as GWT. Likewise, J2CL is not meant to compete with or replace existing JavaScript frameworks; J2CL is about interoperability and cross-platform code reuse.
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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.
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QCon NY (Jun 24-28): New Talks, a Focus on the Skills That Matter & Why You Should Join Us This Year
In the recent Stack Overflow 9th annual survey of over 90,000 software developers, we learned that non-development work remains a productivity challenge for software managers and leaders. At QCon New York, the conference for senior software developers, we have many sessions to help you learn how others have overcome those challenges.
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Teaching the Computer to Play the Chrome Dinosaur Game with TensorFlow.js Machine Learning Library
A simple, yet entertaining and useful for educational purposes application of machine learning, was recently made available on Fritz's HeartBeat Medium publication. Google's machine learning TensorFlow.js library is leveraged in the browser to teach the computer to play the Chrome Dinosaur Game.
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W3C Publishes WebXR Draft Specification for Direct Web Interaction with Immersive Hardware
The World Wide Web Consortium recently published draft specifications for WebXR. The WebXR Device API seeks to provide "the interfaces necessary to enable developers to build compelling, comfortable, and safe immersive applications on the web across a wide variety of hardware form factors".
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Google Experiments with Key-Value Storage, Built-In Modules in Chrome 74
Google recently announced its intent to ship two new WICG proposals in a future version of Chrome. KV Storage attempts to bring the convenience of LocalStorage, but with better performance. The intent is to deliver this as the first example of a built-in module, leveraging the import maps proposal.