Astro 2.0 and TypeScript 5.0 beta

January 27, 2023 By Mark Otto Off

Astro 2.0: The Next-Gen ‘Islands’-Oriented Web Framework — 2.0 includes hybrid rendering (mixing of SSR and SSG outputs), type safety for Markdown & MDX, and an upgrade to Vite 4.0. Astro is worth exploring when performance is key as it works with popular frameworks but lets you deliver the least JS possible to get pages rendered.

Fred Schott

Prefer a talk? Nate Moore’s ViteConf talk ▶️ Islands Architecture, Astro, and You will bring you up to speed.

Deep Cloning Objects in JavaScript, The Modern Way — If you’ve been leaning on something like Lodash for deep cloning, you might not need to any longer. “It’s been a long time coming, but we finally now have the built-in structuredClone function to make deep cloning objects in JavaScript a breeze.”

Steve Sewell

Announcing TypeScript 5.0 Beta — A new major version number, but users of the popular typed JS superset will face a ‘similar upgrade experience’ to previously. Decorators make it in as a first class feature, significant performance and package size optimizations are present, export type * is supported, all enums are now union enums, and much more.

Daniel Rosenwasser (Microsoft)

AlaSQL.js 3.0: Isomorphic JavaScript SQL Database — A SQL database you can use in the browser, Node.js or mobile apps. An interesting bit of functionality is you can use SQL to query JavaScript objects – example. “The library adds the comfort of a full database engine to your JavaScript app. No, really.”

Andrey Gershun

IN BRIEF:

  • 🏅 If you’re really into Vue.js, you’ll soon be able to become officially certified in it.

  • If you’re using React, you should be using a React framework, 🐦 says Andrew Clark of the core team.

  • The creator of alternative JS runtime Bun asks: “If there’s one thing missing from Bun for you to switch, what is it?” You can reply on Twitter.

  • jQAPI.com is an amazing meeting of old and new JavaScript – it’s an Astro powered version of jQuery’s documentation!

📒 Articles & Tutorials

Getting Started with SvelteKit — SvelteKit only recently hit 1.0 and this is a comprehensive overview of how to build a site using the Svelte-oriented app framework. It covers topics like routing, layouts, data, props and more.

Adam Rackis

scrollend: A New JavaScript Event — Finally an event you won’t need a hotel booking for. scrollend provides a new way to detect that a scrolling operation is complete in the browser. Is it another Chrome-only nicety? Surprisingly not – Firefox 109+ supports it too.

Adam Argyle (Chrome Team)

Packaging Rust Apps for the npm Registry — Isn’t npm just for JavaScript projects? Nope. Node is required to make this technique work, but as long as you can package and execute a binary, you’re good to go.

Orhun Parmaksız

While we’re on the topic of less JavaScript, the latest episode of the Stack Overflow podcast ▶️ ‘The less JavaScript, the better’ focuses on Astro.

🛠 Code & Tools

Developer Relations Manager — Join the CKEditor team to build community around an Open Source project used by millions of users around the world 🚀
CKEditor

Find JavaScript Jobs with Hired — Create a profile on Hired to connect with hiring managers at growing startups and Fortune 500 companies. It’s free for job-seekers.
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