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
- A plea to use semicolons when writing JavaScript - Please do use semicolon to end a statement even though it is not necessary.
- 7 Essential JavaScript Functions - David Walsh reviews seven JavaScript functions that every developer should keep in their toolbox.
- 50 JavaScript Tools & Resources from 2015 - One of those traditional end of year round up kind of things.
- A Review of JavaScript Error Monitoring Services - For all of us who want a deeper look at how well our sites’ code is working, there are now services you can use to help monitor and report on JavaScript issues on your site.
Learning more
- Regular Expression Crossword Puzzle - for anyone wanting to test out their regex skills, look no further.
- “Real” Mixins with JavaScript Classes - Justin Fagnani explores what mixins should do, what’s wrong with current JavaScript mixins, and how simple it is to build a very capable mixin system in JavaScript that plays extremely well with classes.
- Interaction Is an Enhancement - It’s critical to craft your website’s experiences to work in any situation by being intentional in how you use specific technologies, such as JavaScript. Take advantage of their benefits while simultaneously understanding that their availability is not guaranteed. That’s progressive enhancement.
- Making a Mini-Lisp: Introduction to Transpilers - This article is an introduction to Transpilers which is the process of translating one programming language into another.
Libraries
- Reading Progress Indicator - A widget containing a list of suggested articles, with a reading progress indicator powered by SVG, CSS and jQuery.
- Flare - Flare is a special-purpose UI library for Purescript. The idea is to define the user interface and the logic of the program at the same time.
- Sharer.js - Sharer.js is a very tiny js lib (~1.6kb) to create custom social share components on DOM elements for your website. No dependencies.
- Viewer.js - A JavaScript image viewer.
ES6
- Paperfold JS - A 3d Paperfold Animation Library.
- Preparing for ECMAScript 6: Destructuring Assignment - ECMAScript 6 (ES2015) destructuring assignment allows you to extract individual items from arrays or objects and place them into variables using a shorthand syntax.
- Promise waterfall - Remy Sharp runs through how to run a series of promises without a library, but also solve a race condition, so they run in sequence (i.e. a waterfall).
Frameworks
- Neon: Node + Rust - If you’re a JavaScript programmer who’s been intrigued by Rust’s hack without fear theme—making systems programming safe and fun—but you’ve been waiting for inspiration, I may have something for you!
- Angular2 for React Developers - Now that Angular 2 is in beta, the time has come for us to drop everything and learn something new, again. The good news is, like React and Angular 1.x, Angular 2 is here to stay for a while so it’s a good investment to become productive with this new framework.
Everything Else
- Run Your Own Scraping API with PhearJS - PhearJS is an open-source software that exposes the power of the PhantomJS headless browser through an HTTP API. You make HTTP-requests to your PhearJS API to fetch a web page and get a nice JSON, containing the rendered HTML and relevant meta data.
- Flagging up Inconsiderate Writing in Microsoft Office Using JavaScript - Alex.js is a service to “Catch insensitive, inconsiderate writing” in text. You can also try out Alex online. Christian Heilmann runs you through it.
- JavaScript: 2015 in Review - Craig Buckler provides an end of year round up to help you keep up with what JS is up to.
- Front-end Tools: Some of My Favorite Finds of 2015 - And for good measure, Louis Lazaris lines up a few notable tools from the year.
- CodeceptJS - Modern era acceptance testing for NodeJS.
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.