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
- Quick Tip: Replace jQuery’s Ready() with Plain JavaScript - If you’re searching for a plain JavaScript alternative for the ready method you can proceed with the DOMContentLoaded event.
- Quick-Tip: Show Modal Popup after Time Delay - How to open a modal window on a web page after a short time delay.
- Reduce JavaScript Errors with JSHint - How to use the open source JSHint tool to analyze and verify that JavaScript code complies with your rules.
Learning more
- Laboratory - JavaScript experiments.
- How to Use Ajax in WordPress – a Real World Example - Ajax has rapidly become a popular web technology, you’ll find it used on most websites. The key feature of Ajax is it can manage database operations without reloading the web page. This means, you can fetch data from the database and display it on the front-end without needing to refresh the page.
- Parsing JSON is a Minefield - JSON is the de facto standard when it comes to (un)serialising and exchanging data in web and mobile programming. But how well do you really know JSON?
- Functions as First-Class Objects in JavaScript: Why Does This Matter? - Functions in JavaScript are first-class objects (or “first-class citizens”). Fascinating, but… what does that mean? Why does it matter? Read on and we’ll have a look!
Libraries
- Shave - A modern javascript plugin for truncating text within an html element.
- jq.node - like jq but WAY MORE powerful.
- Typeis - It’s the smart and simple JavaScript type checker
ES6 and Beyond
- Async functions - making promises friendly - Async functions are enabled by default in Chrome 55 and they’re quite frankly marvelous. They allow you to write promise-based code as if it were synchronous, but without blocking the main thread. They make your asynchronous code less “clever” and more readable.
- 3 cases where JavaScript generators rock (+ understanding them) - One of the new features in ES6 is a new type of function, a generator function. You’ve probable heard of them.
- Overview of JavaScript ES6 features (a.k.a ECMAScript 6 and ES2015+) - JavaScript has changed quite a bit in the last years. These are 12 new features that you can start using today!
- Tips for using async functions (ES2017) - This blog post gives tips for using async functions. If you are unfamiliar with them, you can read chapter “Async functions” in “Exploring ES2016 and ES2017”.
- Three ways of understanding Promises - This blog post covers three ways of understanding Promises.
- ES6 Template Strings, the Handlebars killer? - So what are Template Literals? How can they do what a complex library like Handlebars does? Settle in, dear reader, and let’s find out…
React / Redux
- Redux without React — State Management in Vanilla JavaScript - Working on a web application using Redux and nothing else but vanilla JavaScript.
- React Memory Game - Greetings developers, Shall we play a game?
Yarn
- Yarn vs npm: Everything You Need to Know - Yarn is a new JavaScript package manager built by Facebook, Google, Exponent and Tilde. As can be read in the official announcement, its purpose is to solve a handful of problems that these teams faced with npm.
- Faster, More Reliable CI Builds with Yarn - You may have heard of Yarn. It’s intended as a faster, more reliable alternative to the npm client. It’s nice to have packages install faster locally, but to really get the most from Yarn, you should also be using it with your continuous integration server.
Frameworks
- A Guide to Building Quality Angular 1.5 Components - Angular 1 applications can now be written with components, which changes the best practices and nature of how we write applications.
- Fun Functional Programming with the Choo Framework - With Choo you’ll be writing similar style applications to React and Redux but at a fraction of the cost (file size) and number of API’s.
Everything Else
- JavaScript Grows Up and Gets Its Own Foundation - The Linux Foundation has launched the JavaScript Foundation, an entity “committed to creating a center of gravity within the exponentially expanding JS ecosystem”.
- How to Land Your First Development Job in 5 Simple Steps - This article will guide you step-by-step to help you land and ace coding interviews. If you have the chops, nobody will care that you’ve never worked for anybody before.
- Bringing Markdown to the JavaScript Console - Who knew?
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.