Hi Everyone! In the last two weeks I have been traveling in the South of France with my family - I really needed a break. I’ve quickly assembled this edition composed of a few important releases and a lot of interesting articles. As usual, let me know what you think!
Fastify
Many developers ask the same question when joining the Fastify community: how do we know which modules are core and which one are ecosystem? We have listened and migrated all core modules to use the @fastify scope on npm. Read more at:
We have renamed all of the core Fastify plugins that were prefixed with fastify-. We renamed them to be listed under the @fastify scope. For example, fastify-cookie is now @fastify/cookie. When you try to use latest version of the old pa…
We’re excited to announce that Node.js 18 was released today! Highlights include the update of the V8 JavaScript engine to 10.1, global fetch enabled by default, and a core test runner module.
Up until V8 10.0, the class field initializers had been broken in the V8 startup snapshot - a feature used by embedders like Node.js and Deno to speed up the bootstrapping of themselves or user applications.
Published · Tagged with internals Class fields have been shipped in V8 since v7.2 and private class methods have been shipped since v8.4. After the proposals reached stage 4 in 2021, work had begun to improve the support of the new class features in V8 - until then, there had been two main issues affecting their adoption:
A big news of the last two weeks has been the OpenSSF selecting Node.js for Project Alpha - they will fund the OpenJS Foundation and in turn NearForm to help improve the security of Node.js. Read more at:
Authors: Brian Behlendorf, OpenSSF, and Robin Bender Ginn, OpenJS Foundation Today, we’re excited to announce that Node.js is the first open source community to be supported by OpenSSF’s Alpha-Omega Project.
Undici v5.1.0 (and v5.1.1) has shipped improving fetch and mocks! Check them out.
News
Amazon Aurora is one of the game-changing tools to help developer serverless applications. The newly updated v2 enable to autoscale the capacity of the database on demand! Check out the announcement:
One of the biggest themes of the great resignation are people leaving their jobs to start new businesses. The abundance of VC capital makes this even easier. Should you?
What is Hydration? It’s the technique that makes modern frameworks be able to server-side render and reconstruct the same state in the browser, too. Read up:
Hydration in React was originally not built for SSR. It was because IE6 had a really slow DOM API but relatively fast JS strings. It was faster to concat HTML strings on the client and then "hydrate" it. This equation later changed as more refs were used and the DOM got faster.
Reactivity has been all the buzz in frontend frameworks the last couple of years. It is being celebrated both for its automatic handling of complex updates and for its performance.
I’ve been sitting on writing this article for 2 years. In my heart this was the article I was going to write even before I read @swyx’s quintessential Svelte for Sites, React for Apps.
Jest 28 was released to support Node v18 and improving a lot of things! Note that I normally do not recommend using Jest to test your Node.js applications - however most of you use it anyway. Check it out:
Jest 28 is finally here, and it comes with some long requested features such as support for sharding a test run across multiple machines, package exports and the ability to customize the behavior of fake timers.
Most of the time startups fails into oblivion without no explanation. It’s really good to read up Zaplib post-mortem. I find the article really interesting because it shows that JavaScript (or TypeScript) are to dominate the frontend world for a long time and will not be replaced by Wasm/Rust/AssemblyScript. Check it out:
I write about my journey as a core contributor of Node.js, as an author and a maintainer of many modules - including Fastify and Pino. In addition, I speak at conferences, and I will add links to all my talks in case you missed one.