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
- You Might Not Need JavaScript - JavaScript is great, and by all means use it, while also being aware that you can build so many functional UI components without the additional dependancy.
But then again…
- You Might Need JavaScript - It’s been a rough couple of months for JavaScript. Another day, another rant about it, another article about how the ecosystem is too fragmented, the language too convoluted, and what else.
- Want to learn JavaScript? Watch and Code - Are you trying desperately to learn JavaScript but are feeling lost or overwhelmed by all of the buzzwords, frameworks, and tech? Go for a walk, then forget everything and go Watch and Code; Gordon Zhu has your back.
- Quick Tip: How to Style Google Custom Search Manually - In this quick tip, I will show you how to manually render the search form (without using a special GCSE tag) and a results box which allows for more control and a cleaner way to style the search input field.
- JavaScript Copy to Clipboard - The clipboard.js API for copy to clipboard is short and sweet. Here are a few uses.
Learning more
- A Javascript journey with only six characters - Javascript is a weird and wonderful language that lets us write some crazy code that’s still valid. It tries to help us out by converting things to particular types based on how we treat them.
- How to be* a compiler — make a compiler with JavaScript - *Yes! you should be a compiler. It’s awesome.
- Bringing Pages to Life with the Web Animations API - The Web Animations API allows us to move from the specific, declarative, step-by-step nature of CSS animations to the dynamic, imperative approach of JavaScript that allows for expressive, random, performant animation.
- Stateful and stateless components, the missing manual - The goals of this article are to define what stateful and stateless components are, otherwise known as smart and dumb - or container and presentational components.
- How to Deliver a Smooth Playback without Interruptions (Buffering) - Cloudinary lets you customize the video poster, video controls, and even apply filters and transformations to the video itself. Taking a deeper look, you can even control the bitrate and codecs levels, allowing for better customization of video delivery.
Libraries
- Draft.js - Draft.js is a framework for building rich text editors in React.
- jQuery 3.0: Which build do you need? Full or Slim - JQuery 3.0 is available in a full fat and skinny version. Here’s the pros and cons to help you decide which one is best for you.
- Is jQuery Still Relevant? - Although jQuery’s heyday may have passed, the library is still used at a staggering rate. But how of much of that usage is legacy? And how many developers are choosing to use jQuery in new applications?
- Tesseract.js - Tesseract.js is a pure Javascript port of the popular Tesseract OCR engine.
- How to Manage Your JavaScript Application State with MobX - Matt Ruby tells you how.
- 13 jQuery SelectBox/Drop-down Plugins - A selection of plugins you can incorporate into your next project.
- Getting Started With Paper.js - Paths and Geometry
ES6
- Exploring JavaScript: Typed Arrays - Typed Arrays is a relatively new feature in JavaScript. They are designed to provide an easy way to work with binary data and structures, that was hardly possible before.
- Stupid ES6 tricks - Here are a few ES6 techniques that aren’t really tricks, just exploiting some of the new syntax either to reduce code, improve readability, or possibly just have fun.
#react/Redux - Progressive Web Apps with React.js - Part 4 of a new series walking through tips for shipping mobile web apps optimized using Lighthouse.
- Snowflake - A React-Native Android iOS Starter App/ BoilerPlate / Example with Redux, RN Router, & Jest with the Snowflake Hapi Server running locally or on RedHat OpenShift for the backend.
Other Frameworks
- Yarn - Fast, reliable, and secure dependency management.
- 5 things you can do with Yarn - Yarn is a new package manager for JavaScript created by Facebook. It offers a fast, highly reliable, and secure dependency management for developers using JavaScript in their apps.
- NPM vs Yarn Cheat Sheet - Okay, so you’ve heard about this new JavaScript package manager called yarn, installed it with npm i -g yarn, and now you want to know how to use it? Here are the key notes for switching.
- On 10,000 npm installs - Or what Open Source Software means to me.
- Two-Way Data Binding With Angular2 - This article explores how two-way data binding in Angular 2 is implemented and how it can be implemented in our own directives.
##Other Stuff - We need JavaScript to fix the web - TL;DR: JavaScript is too great an opportunity to build accessible, easy-to-use and flexible solutions for the web to not use it. It fills the gaps years of backwards-compatibility focus created. It helps with the problems of the now and the future that HTML and CSS alone can’t cover reliably. We shouldn’t blindly rely on it – we should own the responsibility to work around its flaky nature and reliability issues.
- Down with the tool fetish! - Drive a stake through its heart! Now!
- Progressive enhancement isn’t dead, but it smells funny - Progressive enhancement is a touchy subject. It can be hard to discuss dispassionately because, like accessibility, it’s often framed as an issue of empathy and compassion.
- The State of JavaScript 2016 - Over nine thousand developers took part in the first edition of the State Of JavaScript survey.
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.