Hello and welcome to ‘This Week in JavaScript’ — another curated collection of links relating to what’s new and exciting in the world of JavaScript. The complete list is tagged jsweekly. (Don’t forget to check out our weekly .NET and front end roundups too!)
And now for this week’s finds …
Getting started
- Why JavaScript Development Is Crazy - Web development is fun! Javascript is … daunting.
- Quick Tip - Try WebAssembly in your browser today.
- The Web isn’t uniform - The Web without JavaScript is empty and broken.
- The Secret To Being A Better Developer - As a software developer, technical skills are a must – they are absolutely necessary, but they are also not sufficient.
- Codepen improves embedded pens - When you’re demonstrating something about the web, there is nothing better than showing people the real code and the real output of that code.
Learning more
- Avoiding a JavaScript Monoculture - JavaScript, as a language, has some fundamental shortcomings. But everyone has a different opinion on what precisely the shortcomings are.
- Prototypal Object-Oriented Programming using JavaScript - JavaScript comes packed with a rich system of object-oriented programming that many programmers don’t know about.
- Turbocharged JavaScript refactoring with codemods - Working in a weed-free garden is a productive pleasure. Codebases are like this too.
- Backbone Views and the DOM - Backbone views provide a useful convention and abstraction for user interfaces. However, to include UI functionality in your app that Backbone, on its own, was not designed to support, you’ll need to consider how to effectively integrate custom or third-party functionality into your Backbone app.
Libraries
- 3 Lightweight React Alternatives: Preact, VirtualDom & Deku - React’s declarative components and virtual DOM rendering have taken the world of frontend development by storm, but it’s not the only library built on those ideas. Dan Prince explores what it’s like to build an application in three other React-like alternatives.
- Chart.js - A simple yet flexible JavaScript charting for designers & developers.
- The Making of “The Aviator”: Animating a Basic 3D Scene with Three.js - A tutorial that explores the basics of creating animated 3D scenes using Three.js.
- can-zone - Zones are an abstraction allowing you to write cleaner code for a variety of purposes, including implementing server-side rendered (SSR) applications, profiling, more useful stack traces for debugging, or a clean way to implement dirty checking.
- Using ReactJS without Webpack - A demonstration of how you can focus on learning React without needing ES2015, JSX compilation or Webpack.
- standardJS - No decisions to make. No .eslintrc, .jshintrc, or .jscsrc files to manage. It just works.
ES6
- ECMAScript 6 — New Features: Overview & Comparison - If you need an ES6 cheat sheet, this one’s for you.
- V8 Release 5.1 - V8 5.1 contains a number of changes towards compliance with the ES2017 draft spec.
Frameworks
- Cross-platform Node.js - An on-going guide to help you write better cross-platform Node.js.
- Node.js v6 - The Node.js Foundation announces the release of Node.js version 6.
- Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About Authentication in Node.js - In this screencast, Randall Degges, Stormpath Developer Evangelist shares all of the best practices he learned while building Stormpath’s Express.js authentication libraries.
- Create a New JavaScript Framework: How We Built the Daily Mail CMS - Daily Mail developer Jason Green tells you about Milo: the Daily Mail’s homegrown JavaScript framework that powers this high-volume news site.
##Other Stuff
- How to Create a Static Site with Metalsmith - An alternative static site generator to Jekyll.
- Tessel 2 - Pairing JavaScript and the Internet of Things with ease.
- JavaScript Testing - Unit vs functional vs integration tests.
##The ‘Well it amused me…’ Section
- Case 225 - The Three Most Terrifying Words
For more links like this and to keep up-to-date with the latest goings on in JS land, you can follow SitePoint’s JavaScript channel on Twitter.
Please PM us if you have anything of interest for the next issue or if there is anything you would like to see featured. Paul and Chris of Arabia.
