Hello and welcome to This Week in JavaScript, our lovingly curated collection of links relating to what’s new and exciting in the world of JS. 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 JavaScript finds …
Getting started
- How to Add a Highlight Effect to Checked Input Field -
- Commit to contribute - How to make it easier and more welcoming for outside developers to contribute, and make sure contributors don’t feel like they’re being asked to do more than necessary?
- 27 popular new github repositories for web developers in 2016 - Some popular new github repositories that earned their first 1500 stars in 2016.
Learning More
- Front-end tools: my favorite finds of 2016 - Some of my favorite finds of the year in the area of tools for front-end developers.
- Zero-based Date, Christmas, and Emoji - It’s important to know that not every method in the Date object returns a zero-based number.
- Quick guide to interfaces with JavaScript - Instead of writing logic to handle all different types of inputs we can define a common interface between them all.
- Faking progress (simple edition) - Visual feedback that something is happening is useful. Recently I’ve started adding this effect without the ajax part to give the user an impression of progress.
- We need a better way of promoting JavaScript projects! - People are upvoting and downvoting every submission like it’s a meme posted on 9gag.
Libraries
- SULU - A hackable file manager application.
- CourierJS - A simple event-manager with middleware.
- Brainfreeze - A more predictable state management alternative.
ES6 and beyond
- Symbols - A new ES6 primitive type and its use cases.
- How to check ES6 code coverage via istanbul and mocha - A relatively elegant way to check ES6 code coverage.
Frameworks
- Why Bower is still relevant - Many developers consider Bower to be a thing of the past that is superseded by npm. But if your webapp is missing a bundler, using Bower is a big improvement over the traditional methods of managing dependencies.
- Siphon - An easy-to-use data extraction library for Node.js designed to work at scale.
- Relay and GraphQL - Part one: mutations. A step by step guide to building a form.
- React or Vue: Which Javascript UI library should you be using? - A lot of web developers are wondering which one they should be using. Is one clearly superior over the other? Do they have specific pros and cons to be aware of? Or are they basically the same?
- React "aha" moments - An “aha” moment is a moment of sudden insight or clarity; when the subject matter suddenly makes sense.
- Form validation tricks in Angular 1.x - The default behavior of controller is to set errors for controls with invalid values immediately when the form is displayed. It’s better to show these errors to user only on their actions like field editing or trying to send/save data, not at once an empty form was shown.
- Replacing Angular’s deep watches with the $doCheck lifecycle hook - By using deep watches, we can ask Angular to keep track of changes happening inside an object, by mutating it, instead of only notifying us when the object’s reference has changed.
- Experiments with Angular renderers - A guide to building your own Angular renderer and your own Angular platform.
- Essential Angular: components and directives - To build an Angular application you define a set of components, for every UI element, screen, and route.
- Angular 4 development has already been started, will ng4 change app development cycle? - Angular 4 will come with a built-in compiler to report on template errors right in an IDE, and advanced compilation and will generate 25% less code.
Cool stuff
A* pathfinding tutorial - An intro to the A* algorithm which uses both the actual distance from the start and the estimated distance to the goal.
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 chrisofarabia.