The state of Node.js in 2023
#481 — April 11, 2023
ℹ️ I mentioned it in the last issue, but in case you missed it, Node Weekly is now sent on Tuesdays, so if you missed us, we’re back. Until we take another break in August. ????
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Peter Cooper, your editor
Trying Node’s Built-In Test Runner — In 2022, Node gained an experimental built-in test runner (node:test). It’s going to become stable in the forthcoming Node v20, so it’s a good time to look at how it works and how it compares to other solutions you might already be using.
Gleb Bahmutov
Improve Login for Your Web Apps with Web Authentication APIs — Upgrade from basic passwords to new APIs like Credentials, WebAuthn API, and Passkeys to use FaceID and biometrics to make passwordless web apps!
Frontend Masters sponsor
Node v19.9.0 (Current) Released — URL.canParse is a new function that checks if an input can be parsed correctly according to the WHATWG URL spec. node:diagnostics_channel introduces TracingChannel, a high-performance channel to publish tracing data about the timing of function executions. Plus the usual dependency updates and bug fixes.
Rafael Gonzaga
▶ The State of Node.js 2023 — One of This Dot Media’s occasional livestreams where they bring together well known names from a particular area to talk about the state of a technology. This time, James Snell, Beth Griggs, Michael Dawson, and Matteo Collina logged on to talk about all things Node related including the imminent release of Node 20, the importance of the working groups, security, certifications, and more. (63 minutes.)
This Dot Media
IN BRIEF:
After three years of diligent service, Node 14’s ‘End of Life’ is later this month, so if you’re on Node 14, get an upgrade plan drawn up ASAP.
▶️ The Node.js repo visualized over time with Gource, a tool for visualizing source code repository growth.
The folks at Socket are looking into using ChatGPT to do threat analysis of npm packages.
PGP-based npm registry signatures will be deprecated on April 25th 2023.
Electron 24.0.0 Released — Not content to take a rest after turning 10 years old, the latest version of the popular cross platform ‘build desktop apps with HTML and JavaScript’ packs in Node.js v18.14, V8 11.2, and Chromium 112.
Electron Team
JSDayIE 2023: The First JavaScript Conference in Ireland Is Back! — Join us on September 26th in Dublin to experience everything the Irish JavaScript community and Ireland have to offer.
JSDayIE sponsor
Mastering Yarn’s Lifecycle with Hooks — Aims to equip you with the knowledge needed to create your own Yarn plugins and “elevate your package management game”.
Sergio Cinos
???? Code & Tools
NPKILL 0.11.1: Delete node_modules Even Faster — NPKILL (homepage) is a popular tool for listing node_modules folders and how much space they take up, before allowing you to quickly delete them. This new release makes it even faster than before through using worker threads.
Gallardo and Gómez
Croner: Cron for JavaScript and TypeScript — Trigger functions upon the schedule of your choice using the classic cron syntax. Works in Node, Deno, Bun and the browser, across time zones, offers error handling and overrun protection, and more. There’s an interesting live demo on JSFiddle.
Hexagon
Chrome Extension CLI: CLI for Building Chrome Extensions — Want to get building an extension for Chrome as quickly as possible? This Node-powered tool aims to get you on the right path ASAP. v1.4 adds a script to generate a zip file of the extension.
Dutiyesh Salunkhe
cron-schedule 4.0: Cron Parser and Scheduler — Parse and query cron style expressions in the browser, Node or Deno.
Pascal Sthamer
tsPEG: A PEG Parser Generator for TypeScript
Eoin Davey
???? Jobs
Full Stack JavaScript Engineer @ Emerging Cybersecurity Startup — Small team/big results. Fun + flexible + always interesting. Come build our award-winning, all-in-one cybersecurity platform.
Defendify
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QUICK RELEASES:
Tedious 16.0
↳ TDS module for connecting to SQL Server.
TestCafe 2.5
↳ Automate end-to-end web testing.
rimraf 5.0
↳ rm -rf for Node apps.
better-sqlite3 8.3
↳ Fast and simple SQLite3 library.
Foal 3.2
↳ Full-featured webapp framework.
pnpm 8.2
↳ The fast and efficient package manager.
Middy 4.3
↳ Middleware engine for AWS Lambda.
