JavaScript News, Updates, and Tutorials: August 2023 Edition

Hello to all JavaScript admirers! It is time to meet the August edition of our news digest. We’ve prepared for you a fresh portion of news and updates from DHTMLX and the rest of the JavaScript world.

First of all, we will highlight the latest release of our Suite library and a new video tutorial dedicated to the usage of our Scheduler component with Salesforce. Then we are going to discuss the updates from TypeScript, VanJS, Gatsby, Deno, and Fresh.

The second part of our digest is traditionally devoted to useful materials on various JavaScript-related topics.

New Releases and Updates

What’s New from DHTMLX Team

DHTMLX Suite is one of the most demanded JavaScript libraries in our portfolio designed to speed up the delivery of data-intensive apps. Our customers regularly share with us their thoughts on how to improve all of our products, including the Suite library. And some of these ideas were brought to life in Suite 8.2.

The Form widget became the main focus of this release. Now you can create more visually appealing and functional forms using four new controls — Fieldset, Avatar, Toggle, and ToggleGroup. In Grid and TreeGrid widgets, we expanded configuration options for header/footer tooltips. It is also worth noting significant improvements in data filtering achieved via API updates in DataCollection and TreeCollection. Check out the release article to learn more about the features provided in Suite 8.2.

Apart from that, this month we also rolled out a new video tutorial on our YouTube channel. This tutorial unveils all the technical aspects of integrating our JavaScript Scheduler into the Salesforce Lightning Web Component.

Meet TypeScript 5.2

TypeScript is loved by many developers for making the coding process more controlled and straightforward. The development team of the project from Google remains on the chosen course to make TypeScript even more developer-friendly and regularly provides substantial updates. The latest one (v5.2) has been rolled out this month.

The key features of this release are explicit resource management and using declarations that give a way to simplify the “cleanup” of particular resources. For instance, it can be used for deleting temporary files or freeing memory. In v5.2, you can also make use of another useful feature called decorator metadata aimed to facilitate the creation and consumption of metadata. Interestingly, both mentioned features are also expected to become a part of JavaScript’s ECMAScript standard.

The list of other features shipped in TypeScript 5.2 includes a lack of restrictions on tuple labels, easier method usage for unions of arrays, coma completions for object members, and much more. To get the full information on TypeScript 5.2, read the release article.

VanJS 1.0 is Here

VanJS (short for Vanilla JavaScript) is a relatively new reactive UI framework designed to make UI programming less labor-intensive, especially for young programmers. It has a strange name for a framework, but in fact, it stays very close to vanilla JS under the hood, using no transpiling, virtual DOM, or hidden logic. Everything is built using simple JS functions and DOM. Recently, VanJS has been updated to the first stable version (1.0).

This major update is a big step forward for VanJS that marks the commitment to API stability and makes it ready for production. The updated VanJS comes with a more intuitive API for complex state binding, advanced state derivations, NPM support, and other improvements. Get acquainted with VanJs 1.0 in more detail by visiting the GitHub page of the project.

Introducing Gatsby Adapters

Gatsby is a well-known rendering framework (also called a reactive site generator) based on React and used for creating performant applications. It allows developers to benefit from deferred static generation, server-side rendering, and serverless functions. But until recently, it was necessary to add some glue code to be able to use these features on various deployment platforms. But now this inconvenience is eliminated with the appearance of Gatsby Adapters.

In practice, adapters take the production output from Gatsby and transform it into something that a specific deployment platform will correctly interpret. As a result, adapters should make it much easier to build and deploy Gatsby-based sites or apps on any deployment platform. Learn more about this powerful addition to Gatsby in this blog post.

New Releases from Deno Company

In our previous news digest, we reviewed minor releases of the Deno runtime environment and web framework named Fresh which are both led and maintained by the Deno company. This month, the Deno team once again pleased users with new updates for these products.

The new version (v.1.36) of the Deno runtime environment brings in more security options for the runtime. For instance, now it is now possible to configure both allow and deny lists for network communication, file system access, and other potentially sensitive APIs. In addition, this release includes improved testing and benchmarking APIs, better Node.js compatibility, and numerous quality-of-life improvements.

The new Fresh 1.4 is dedicated to improving the overall developers’ experience with the framework. It provides faster page loads with ahead-of-time compilation, simplified usage of shared layouts, quicker typing with defined functions, and other new capabilities. Moreover, the development team also shared what we can expect from Fresh in the future. They already started working on overhauling the framework’s plugin system, adding support for view, and spa-like client navigation.

Useful Tips and Articles

Why Use Commercial JavaScript Libraries in Web Startups

It is not a secret that many web startup businesses have limited budgets, thus they often resort to using open-open source libraries and tools to speed up the development process. it can be a good decision to save money and still be able to help developers with some common coding tasks.

However, startups can hardly count on open-source tools when it comes to implementing more advanced functionalities, regular updates and bug fixes, and technical support. If these things are important for a project, then it is necessary to consider commercial JavaScript libraries, especially since many vendors offer special programs and discounts for startups. In this article, you can find more information on how paid JavaScript libraries can be useful for startup projects.

Pros and Cons of Using Web Components

When you read about the numerous benefits of using Web Components on the internet, you can’t help but wonder why still not everyone uses them. It is hard to argue that Web components have a number of great features (reusability, encapsulation, etc.), they are a popular choice for building micro frontends, and you can use them with popular front-end frameworks (Angular, React, Vue, etc.). But just like any other technology, web components also have some downsides. The author of this article gives an interesting perspective on the pros and cons of using web components.

New Way to Declare Variables in JavaScript

It is common to use variables when it is necessary to store a piece of data in JavaScript. Variables are created with the help of special keywords. Until recently, there were three keywords for this purpose — var, let, and const. But now you can also declare variables with the new using keyword. But you should know some peculiarities related to the usage of this keyword and they are clearly explained in this video.

How to Add and Remove Event Listeners in JavaScript

JavaScript event listeners are crucial for adding interactive content to HTML elements. They make it possible to detect and react to events that occur on a web page (click on a button, page load, etc.). Thus, it is important for any programmer to clearly understand the basics of adding JavaScript event listeners and removing them when they’re no longer needed. This tutorial provides the required information on the subject.

How to Build a Simple API with Deno

We’ve been talking about Deno and its updates in the last two editions of our news digest. So it is the right time to give you some sense of how Deno can be used in practice. You can use it to build server-side apps, command-line tools, and other JavaScript/TypeScript-based projects. In this tutorial, you will learn how to build a simple todo API with CRUD functionality.

We hope that this JavaScript news digest has been useful and informative for you. Thanks for reading and stay tuned for more JavaScript news in autumn.