Bookmarks (221)

QuickReader: A High Performance Stream Reader for Browser and Node — The idea is you define the exact bits and pieces you need up front and grab them from the stream on the fly.

node-mbus: Node Bindings to libmbus — A curious use case here. libmbus is used to communicate over the ‘meter bus’ protocol used by various utility (gas, electricity, etc.) meters. I have no idea how it works, but a homemade Node-powered smart meter would be pretty cool.

Serverless-Express 4.9: Run Existing Frameworks on AWS Lambda or Azure Functions — The idea is that you can build HTTP APIs in the usual way on top of Express, Koa, Hapi or whatever, and this provides the wrapper necessary to let them run on AWS Lambda or Azure Functions.

Prisma 4.0 Released: The Next Gen ORM — No official blog post yet but plenty to see here, plus there’s a What’s New in Prisma 4.0 talk coming later today, and an upgrade guide.

Highlights from OpenJS World 2022 — OpenJS World took place a few weeks ago in Austin, Texas and in this post Marian covers some of the talking points, top talks, and what made the event special. There’s a YouTube playlist of over 50 talks from the event, with some highlights here (note the audio is very quiet on some of them):

Should Node.js Directly Support Web Workers? — Web Workers provide a way for JavaScript in the browser to run on background threads, taking the heat off the main thread. Browsers support them, Deno supports them, and while Node has Worker Threads, Sindre argues Node should align with the broader standard.

Working with the File System from Node.js — Dr. Axel seems to be on a bit of a Node kick lately and comes back this week with a particularly deep dive on all things related to working with text files from Node, from simple reading and writing operations to streams, buffers, and directory manipulation.

SQSLite: A Lightweight Module for Integration Testing AWS SQS — Jenny gave a talk at OpenJS World 2022 about how and why she built this.

DeploySentinel: A New Tool for Debugging Flaky Cypress Tests — It’s new and behind an email wall for now, but enough of a preview is shown here that it may be of interest to some.

Alternatives to Installing npm Packages Globally — A topic that often trips folks up, also covered by the venerable doctor.

Middy 3.1: Node Middleware Engine for AWS Lambda — A popular way to simplify your code when building Node-powered serverless functions on AWS Lambda.

grammY: An Up-to-Date Telegram Bot Framework — Allegedly “makes creating Telegram bots so simple you already know how to do it.”

public-ip 6.0: Quickly Get Your Public IP Address — Works in both Node and browser and uses different approaches on each. v6 lets you choose between IPv6 and IPv4.

node-website-scraper: Download A Site to a Local Directory — Imagine the functionality of wget --mirror but as a fully controllable and configurable Node library.

Moon: A New Build System for the JavaScript Ecosystem — Built in Rust for performance, Moon appears to be focused on features for larger projects with lots of dependencies, developers, and processes. It’ll be interesting to see this one develop further.

Tinypool: An Even Smaller Node.js Worker Pool Library — A fork of the powerful Piscina that aims for fewer depdencies and a smaller footprint overall.

Integrate eSignatures in Your App in Less Than a Week — Enable document signing from anywhere with HelloSign's eSignature functionality. Test the API for free.

js-fire 1.0: Generate CLIs from JavaScript Objects — Google’s Python Fire is a Google tool for creating CLIs from Python objects and this JavaScript clone brings the same thing to us.

Microvium: A Tiny JavaScript Engine for Microcontrollers — How tiny? Try 8.5 kilobytes tiny and using just 34 bytes of RAM when idle. JavaScript has never been a natural fit for such constraints but projects like this (and Elk or low.js) are doing interesting things (here’s how Microvium works) and this one has particularly good language support. GitHub repo.

Puppeteer 15.0: Control Headless Chrome from Node — Playwright has taken a lot of the browser remote control attention in recent years, but Puppeteer, which focuses on Chrome, is still a great option. It now uses Chromium 103 and supports Node 18.

Using Web Streams in Node.js — Streams provide a handy abstraction for cleanly working with streaming data but Web Streams (a.k.a. WHATWG Streams) are a different, more broadly supported beast to classic Node.js streams. Dr. Axel starts from the basics but goes into a lot of depth here - a handy resource.

ow 1.0: Function Argument Validation for Humans — A fluent API to define constraints for function arguments (e.g. ow(input, ow.string.minLength(5))) and get nice error messages if those validations fail. Now a pure ESM package. GitHub repo.

zx v7.0: Better Script Writing with Node.js — No, not movie scripts, but shell scripts and the like. If writing JavaScript instead of wrestling with bash, Perl or Python sounds better to you, zx can make your life easier. v7.0 is fully rewritten in TypeScript, has an echo function for printing the output of other scripts, within for creating new async contexts, and a...

Node.js 16 to Meet an Early Demise (in 2023) — The Node.js team is bringing forward the ‘end of life’ date of Node.js 16 by seven months due to OpenSSL 1.1.1, a fundamental dependency, reaching its own end of support in September 2023. Don’t panic. You’ve got over a year to get to grips with Node.js 18.

New Fullstack TypeScript Course — Build a full-stack app that generates TypeScript code from data layer to front-end all from a GraphQL schema.

Scaling GraphQL with Redis Consumer Groups — A useful look at some of the architecture of how a SaaS product is horizontally scaling Node-based services on Redis, particularly using streams.

How to Scrape eBay Organic Results with Node — eBay probably won’t like it, but it might be legal where you are, and this post mentions the fabulous Selector Gadget, perhaps my longest installed browser extension.

Strapi v4.2: The Open-Source Node.js Headless CMS — Strapi has commercially moved somewhat beyond being merely a handy open-source Node project (it even has its own marketplace of plugins now) but it’s still MIT licensed and rocking away on GitHub.

Mercurius 10.0: Implement GraphQL Servers and Gateways with Fastify — Maybe it’s just a side effect of the Fastify 4 release last week, but I’m seeing Fastify mentioned everywhere lately. Mercurius helps you bring GraphQL to Fastify’s typically RESTful party.

cat-names 3.1: Get Popular Cat Names — Do you need access to random cat names in your app? Live a little.

Node File Trace: A Node.js Dependency Tracing Utility — This less controversial type of NFT (😏) can be used to determine exactly which files are needed for a Node app to run.

Fastify 4.0 Released — The first major release of a popular, high performance Node.js Web framework in two years warrants some celebration. A focus has been placed on stabilization, modernization, and improving the already quite stable developer experience, rather than flashy new features, although this post does cover a few updates.

Soap 0.44.0: A SOAP Client and Server for Node — This module lets you connect to web services using SOAP. It also provides a server that allows you to run your own SOAP services.

The Official Node.js MongoDB Driver v4.7.0 — Quite a lot in this release including support for zstd compression, initial suppor for queryable encryption (a very new MongoDB feature), clustered collection support, estimated document counting, better performance in serverless environments, and improved support for change stream events.

is-online 10.0: Check if The Internet Connection Is Up — Works in both Node.js and the browser and uses three parallel approaches to check if the Internet is really available. Now a pure ES module.

Nano ID 4.0: A Unique String ID Generator — Tiny (130 bytes), secure, and URL-friendly. 4.0 drops CommonJS support, it’s ESM all the way here, though the 3.x branch will remain supported for now.

aws-lambda-fastify 3.0: Serve Fastify-Powered Apps on AWS Lambda — If Fastify is your Node web framework of choice and you want to go serverless, this is for you. Note that as of v3.0 the name of this package in the npm registry has changed from aws-lambda-fastify to @fastify/aws-lambda.

node-microtime: Get The Current Time in Microseconds — Milliseconds not good enough for you? Microtime goes a little lower under the hood (to gettimeofday) and gives you microseconds, although accuracy depends entirely on your OS and hardware.

qnm: CLI Utility for Looking at node_modules Directories — The goal is to make it easier to see what’s going on in a node_modules directory of choice including letting you search for packages. Supports both npm and Yarn.

WebContainers Now Supported in Firefox on Desktop and Android — WebContainers is a ‘full stack’ Node.js environment that runs entirely within the browser built by the folks at online IDE StackBlitz. It’s worked in Chrome since launch a year ago, but now collaboration with Mozilla has brought it to Firefox too.

Creating a GraphQL Server in Node.js — A walkthrough, along with downloadable code, of creating a GraphQL API server using Mercurius, a GraphQL adapter for the Fastify framework.

The Case for Prisma in the 'Jamstack' — Prisma is a an ORM built for JavaScript and TypeScript, which can be useful for connecting to data within the backend of your Jamstack application. The author makes the case for why Prisma and shows how to integrate it with Next.js, RedwoodJS and Cloudflare Workers.

npm Security Update: What GitHub Learnt About April's Attack — Back in April, GitHub reported that stolen OAuth user tokens were used to access some private repositories, private package manifests and metadata, as well as npm user account data, and they've shared the full story here.

Commander 9.3: Node Command-Line Interfaces Made Easy — The long standing ‘batteries included’ system for building apps that interface with the command line.

Jest Image Snapshot: A Jest Matcher for Image Comparisons — Say hello to visual regression testing using this tool from American Express. Take image snapshots of your app within a test and compare them against a baseline. It can even handle tolerances if you want to ignore subtle changes and only throw on huge discrepancies.

pkg.land: A Way to Find Alternative npm Packages — It’s quite a minimally designed site but it attempts to give you suggestions for related or alternative packages to use. I’m not entirely convinced by the approach so far (consider express’s alternatives) but it’s fast and shows promise (such as for the colors package.)

Using N|Solid Runtime from npm — N|Solid Runtime is a special Node.js distribution that includes N|Solid’s agent to extract live metrics and app behavior information from apps in production.

How We Converted Our Node.js Library to Deno (using Deno) — “We landed on a “runtime adapter” pattern that we think represents a general-purpose approach that may be useful to other library authors looking to support Deno.”

Top 500 npm Package Maintainers Now Require 2FA — In response to numerous security issues with the npm ecosystem in recent years, GitHub has been keen to encourage package maintainers to use 2FA to tighten up the supply chain. The maintainers of popular packages now have to use it, but if you maintain any packages at all, you can learn more about how to...