Bookmarks (1411)

11 Top Node ORMs, Query Builders and Database Libraries in 2020 — Choosing an ORM or query builder for your app can be daunting, but this roundup from the folks at Prisma really goes into some depth on the most popular options including Mongoose, Knex.js, Sequelize and, yes, Prisma (so take the bias into account).

react-nil: A React 'Null Renderer' — An interesting experiment to use React in situations where you don’t need it to render anything, but you want to use hooks, suspense, context, and other bits of the React ecosystem. Like in, say, a Node app. Maybe this CodeSandbox example will provoke some thoughts.

Graffiti: A Minimalistic GraphQL Framework — The file-system is the main API. Every .js file becomes a schema definition that gets automatically processed and converted to GraphQL API.

ffmpeg.wasm: FFmpeg for Browser and Node, Powered by WebAssembly — Brings the power of the popular multimedia transformation tool to some new places, though it’s rather experimental as you can probably appreciate.

Shoulders: Quickly View A List of Your Dependencies' Open Issues — Quickly view a list of open issues for the open-source packages that your project depends on. You don’t even need to install it: npx shoulders will do the job.

VS Code Tips for Power Users — I remember when Vim tutorials were all the rage, but now it’s Visual Studio Code, so here are some tips and techniques to help you make the most of it.

Pretty JSON.stringify() Output in JavaScript — When you need to convert JavaScript objects to JSON, you’ll probably encounter JSON.stringify() but can its output be made more readable as may be beneficial in logging or debugging situations? Yes.

Node v14.12.0 (Current) Released — Just a single release this week and not for security reasons. No new features either, just an update to uvwasi 0.0.11 (a WebAssembly system call API) and N-API to version 7.

tinyhttp 0.4: A Lightweight and Modular Express-Like Web Framework — Written in TypeScript and claims to be faster than Express but with full Express middleware support. GitHub repo and 0.4 release notes.

Node 15.0 Release Candidate Zero — This is only for those of you who like to live on the edge. There’s not even an official blog post. The final Node 15 release is expected next month and we’ll cover it more as it approaches.

The Default Behavior of Unhandled Rejections to Change — One thing that’s potentially on the cards for Node 15 (see below) is that unless rejections are handled, they turn (or ‘blow up’, dare I say) into thrown exceptions. So if you ever cop out on handling rejections, it might be time to make this best practice a core part of your Node repertoire!

Working with OAuth in Node.js CLI Apps — This is useful because it’s not the most obvious of things to do.

Playwright 1.4: Fast and Reliable Cross-Browser Testing — Despite being 1.4, this is a pretty big release for the Puppeteer alternative. It now includes a CLI playwright-cli with which you can record user interactions and generate Playwright scripts, generate page screenshots, and more. Plus there’s experimental support for recording videos of what your scripts do with the browser.

Telegraf: A Modern Telegram Bot Framework for Node — I’ve not used this library yet, but Telegram is a pretty good messaging system to write bots or automated clients for as it has a solid API, and this project seems incredibly thorough.

How I Built a Serverless Recipe App with FaunaDB and Vue.js — If you tend to turn to Express.js and a more traditional database for building CRUD apps, this post will present an interesting alternative approach to you. And if you ever get hooked on serverless approaches, we have a newsletter for that! 😁

▶  What I Didn’t Do and Why: A Node Story with Dan Shaw — Dan Shaw is a well known name in the Node world as a founder of the Node.js Foundation, The Node Firm, and then NodeSource – plus co-host of NodeUp. In this hour long talk he covers his long history with Node and how the community and ecosystem have grown.

Performance Best Practices When Using Express in Production — Split into sections about what to do in your code and what to do on the ops side of things.

When the Bits Hit the Fan: AppSignal — AppSignal provides insights into errors, performance, servers and more - all in one clear and easy interface.

Running a Serverless OAuth Proxy with Grant — Grant is a JavaScript-powered OAuth proxy that, till now, has needed to be run in a typical HTTP servery way, but.. it now supports AWS Lambda, Azure Functions, Cloud Functions and Vercel out of the box.

How to Debug a Node App Deployed with Jenkins X using Rookout — Note that this refers to Jenkins X, a Jenkins variant focused on CD on Kubernetes.

npm v7.0.0 Beta 11 Released — Beta 10 was meant to be the last beta before RC but a few things came up.. 😄

chrome-aws-lambda: A Chromium Binary for AWS Lambda — A project to make it easy to use a headless Chrome instance from your AWS Lambda serverless functions. Sees frequent updates.

Gemini 4: A 'Currently Playing' Viewer for Spotify — A basic Electron app that offers an ‘easy on the eyes’ way to see what’s currently playing in Spotify.

The Braintree Node.js Library 3.0 — If you use Braintree’s payment services, this is the first major update to their Node client library in a long while.

New Course: 🐧 Complete Intro to Linux and the Command-Line — Gain powerful command-line skills, learn to use Ubuntu, quit VIM, handle package management, and write your own shell scripts.

Undici: An HTTP/1.1 Client, Written From Scratch for Node — Particularly interesting because it’s under the official Node.js organization on GitHub. Why would you use this? As Matteo Collina notes: “If you need to lower the cost of your remote http calls by 2” and “This replaces the node core api with something significantly faster.”

Machine Learning for JavaScript Devs in 10 Minutes — Covers the absolute basics but puts you in a position to move on elsewhere.

What's New in Mongoose 5.10: Global Subdocument Configuration — The Mongoose expert is back with more for MongoDB-using Node developers.

npm v7.0.0 Beta 10 Released — Isaac says this should be the last beta v7 release with release candidates due to start next week.

ngrok for VSCode: Public URLs for Local Dev Servers — ngrok is a popular service and project for opening up a secure tunnel to local dev servers for testing, etc. This lets you control it from VS Code.

MikroORM 4: A TypeScript ORM for Node — Based around the Data Mapper, Unit of Work and Identity Map patterns, it supports MongoDB, MySQL, MariaDB, Postgres and SQLite. GitHub repo.

FixCache: A GitHub App That Keeps Track of Bug-Prone Files From Commit History — An implementation of an idea from this academic paper about predicting the most fault prone ‘entities’ or files within a project.

Admin Bro: An Admin Panel for Node Apps — You provide the database models and Admin Bro generates the UI to manage data.

Node v14.10.0 (Current) Released — Nothing big here, lots of documentation edits, and a few minor tweaks such as the crypto package gaining a randomInt function that will return a integer within a certain range in a way that there’s no modulo bias, e.g. crypto.randomInt(1, 10)

Node Resiliency Concepts: Recovery and Self-Healing — A look at a variety of ways by which to improve your process management and server management skills, such as with tools like Docker, pm2, and supervisor.

September 2020 Security Releases Due Next Week — The Node.js project will release new versions of all supported release lines sometime on or after next Tuesday (September 15) to fix three security issues. One issue, which affects only v14.x, is critical in nature. We’ll report on these release in next week’s issue.

Surviving a Heatwave Using Google Cloud Functions — Dealing with a humid and hot summer in Belgium, Adriaan wanted some reminders to open and close his windows and curtains at certain times to keep temperatures bearable. This is how he approached the task using Google’s serverless platform.

Reading and Writing CSV Files with node-csv — Using the csv-parse module to read CSV (comma separated values) files and the csv-stringify module to stringify data before writing it to a file.

Log Management for Modern Engineering Teams — Extract what you need with saved searches, alerts, dashboards, and visualizations and easily share valuable data with your team.

Why I Actively Discourage Online Tooling like jwt.io and Online JSON Validators — Why one engineer thinks you should be opting for local tooling when working with sensitive data, even non-production data.

▶  The Expressway to Fastify with Matteo Collina — A podcast covering the topic of Fastify, a performance focused web framework for Node, and why you might use it instead of Express.

▶  Making WAVs: Understanding, Parsing, and Creating Wave Files — If you’ve not watched any of the Low Level JavaScript videos yet, you’re missing a treat. But this is a good place to start, particularly if the topic of working with a data format at a low level appeals to you.

What's New in Mongoose 5.10: Optimistic Concurrency — Another useful post for any MongoDB and Mongoose users. Valeri is truly the expert to turn to when using MongoDB from Node, as you might recall from when we interviewed him.

Yarn 2.2 Package Manager Released — As well as being smaller and faster, a dedupe command has been added to deduplicate dependencies with overlapping ranges.

Commander 6.1: Node Command-Line Interfaces Made Easy — Commander is a long standard ‘batteries included’ system for building apps that interface with the command line in Node. For example, you can define command line passable options, process said options, define commands (e.g. the commit in git commit), automate the provision of help, and generally add a bit more structure.

Danfo.js: A Pandas-Like Library for Data Processing — An introduction to a new library (homepage) that provides high-performance, intuitive, and easy-to-use data structures for manipulating and processing structured data following a similar approach to Python’s Pandas library. GitHub repo.