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
- Improve Your JavaScript Learning with Fun Experiments - Learning never stops — especially in web development. Our industry is constantly renewing and improving itself, and so should we! Unfortunately, keeping up can be exhausting, but it doesn’t have to be. In this article Tim Severien will show you how small experiments can be a fun and effective way to learn new things, and to ensure that learning and keeping up-to-date stays fun.
- Quick Tip: Add or Remove a CSS Class with Vanilla JavaScript - Sometimes you need to add or remove a CSS class with JavaScript, and you don’t want to include an entire library like jQuery to do it.
- Master the DOM - It’s not as hard as you might think.
- Get Started With JavaScript Arrays - Practically all programming languages have an in-built array data type. JavaScript is no different. They store the data you need to run scripts for an application, which, from a developer’s perspective, means you’ll be writing less code, making you more productive. That’s why it’s worth knowing your way around them.
Learning more
- Everything You Should Know About Progressive Web Apps - This tutorial covers everything you need to know about PWAs, step by step, with practical examples and a demo app.
- The Basics of Web Application Security - Modern web development has many challenges, and of those security is both very important and often under-emphasized. While such techniques as threat analysis are increasingly recognized as essential to any serious development, there are also some basic practices which every developer can and should be doing as a matter of course.
- What, Exactly, Makes Something A Progressive Web App? - There are a lot of opinions and many shades of gray. What are the hard requirements? Which requirements are marginal? What’s aspirational? This article outlines these requirements, attempts to classify them, and provides a baseline for “what is a Progressive Web App?”
- Loading Polyfills Only When Needed - Phillip Walton takes a look at how to load polyfill only when required.
- Why you should avoid using document.write, specifically for scripts injection - Web performance testing tools like Google Page Speed or Dareboost already pointed it: injecting a script by using document.write instruction causes severe issues about websites loading time.
Libraries
- Reframe.js - Reframe.js is a javascript plugin that makes unresponsive elements responsive.
- Particles.js: Control Particle Count and Shape - The previous Particles.js tutorial briefly discussed various features that the library offers and how to get started with the library. This tutorial covers in detail all the aspects of Particles.js that deal with the physical appearance of particles.
- g9.js - automatically interactive graphics.
- TAGGD - Despite images say more than a thousands words, sometimes it’s just not enough. Taggd allows you to add tooltips to your image. That sounds way less exciting than it is, though.
ES6 & Beyond
- JavaScript Asynchronous Iteration Proposal - The Asynchronous Iteration proposal is already in stage 2 and being heavily worked on.
- Three useful Babel presets - As of version 6, Babel supports presets, sets of features that can be enabled together. This blog post looks at three new useful Babel presets (and, as a bonus, two presets especially for Node.js).
- ES proposal: global - The ECMAScript proposal “global” by Jordan Harband is currently at stage 3. It provides a new standard way of accessing the global object.
- How React Do? - Jeff Fowler’s dev log made whilst exploring React.
- Codebase Overview - This will give you an overview of the React codebase organisation, its conventions, and the implementation.
Other Frameworks
- Build a Search Engine with Node.js and Elasticsearch - Elasticsearch is an open source search engine, which is gaining popularity due to its high performance and distributed architecture. In this article, Behrooz Kamali discusses its key features and walks you through the process of using it to create a Node.js search engine.
- Building a Serverless Mesh Processing Microservice in Node.js - While in traditional architectures applications run in long-running servers, in serverless architectures applications run in event-triggered stateless containers.
- Node.js debugging with Chrome DevTools - If you use Node.js for your project, now you can debug and make changes for all your JavaScript from one place- Chrome DevTools. You also can use all the power of Chrome DevTools applying it to Node.js code.
- Get Started With Angular 2 and TypeScript - In this video tutorial from the course, Get Started With Angular 2, we’ll look at how TypeScript works with Angular 2.
##Everything Else
- JavaScript for Web Designers - If staring down JavaScript leaves you unsteady, take heart. Mat Marquis is at your side, offering a detailed yet approachable tour around this essential language.
- TypeScript 2.0 - is now available.
- JavaScript Speech Recognition - Browser tech sometimes lags behind native technology but not for speech recognition: the technology in the browser today and it’s time to use it: the SpeechRecognition API.
- js-next - A JavaScript next generation apps scaffolder.
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.