Issue 5 - JSK Weekly

Looks like an approaching spring (or autumn if you live in the southern hemisphere) season caused developers to wake up from the winter sleep and produce a lot of quality stories. It was really hard to pick up the best ones for this newsletter issue.

Observables are coming to ECMAScript, Node.js got support for async / await and support for ECMAScript Modules in Node.js is coming!

The Angular team has announced that they will skip version 3 and release Angular 4 this month. Abhishek Maitrey writes about that and the future Angular roadmap. Chris Nwamba writes about the new features in Angular 4. After some period of small bug fix releases, we also have a new release of Aurelia framework, with the first release of validation library, Webpack integration improvements, new Aurelia CLI features and more.


General

How Many Levels Of JavaScript Are You On?

There's a short comic floating around the Twitterverse that pokes fun at Functional Programming nerds. It's often on my mind because I find it absolutely hilarious. It's a subtle, subversive, and surreal kind of comedy. I can't exactly explain why I find it so funny, but I do.

Authored by: DebugMe

The Tools Of The JS Trade

A friend of mine asked me, which build tool he should use for his JavaScript project. He was like "Npm, Bower, Gulp, or Webpack? I don't know!"... So you probably heard of JavaScript Fatigue, the problem many Web developers haunt, especially the people who started from the safe haven of Ruby on Rails, that didn't live through the struggle before.

Authored by: K.

Interview with Kris Borchers, JS Foundation Executive Director

Elio Qoshi is joined by Kris Borchers, JS Foundation Executive Director, to talk about the organization's beginnings, current projects and what lies ahead.

Authored by: Elio Qoshi

jQuery - training wheels of the web

I remember when jQuery developers announced that they have the coolest thing around. It was so precious to them that they put it in chain syntax.

Authored by: Develoger


JavaScript

Observables are Coming to ECMAScript!

Observables in JavaScript were largely popularized by libraries such as RxJS and Bacon.js. Jafar Husain, a Netflix tech lead and long-time functional programming advocate who’s also on TC39 has been developing a proposal to bring observables into the core language.

Authored by: Nicolas Bevacqua

The Habits of Effective JavaScript Developers

My worst fear is becoming one of those programmers who are stuck in time. You know who I'm talking about. These developers, who at some point in time made a terrible unconscious decision. "I know enough, I have tons of experience now."

Authored by: Dor Tzur

The web share API

The web share API is actually quite a simple API. It is available on the navigator object and consists of one method; share. The method takes an object that can have title, text or url properties.

Authored by: Phil Nash


TypeScript

Trying TypeScript

Recently I have tried TypeScript (v2.2) with Visual Studio Code editor (v1.10) and must admit that it was a very positive experience. Here is a short tutorial to get anyone started with TypeScript.

Authored by: Gleb Bahmutov


Angular.js

Angular 4 and What is Coming Up Next

The final version of Angular 4 is all set to be released this month, which got us wondering about its new features, and what the Angular team is doing up next.

Authored by: Abhishek Maitrey

Planning an Angular Application

Todd Motto runs through some of the considerations you should review when planning to build an application using Angular (i.e. Angular 2).

Authored by: Todd Motto

5 Features To Watch Out For in Angular 4

By now, most probably, we have come in peace with the fact that Angular will be rolling out features using semantic versioning. This means we've got to worry less about nor entirely new concept (at least for now). Angular skipped version 3 to 4 so as to sync all the different modules.

Authored by: Chris Nwamba

Event Emitters in Angular

When you start learning Angular one of the first things you learn is how to communicate between child and parent components. Data flows into your component via property bindings and flows out of your component through event bindings.

Authored by: netanel basal

The Angular 2 vs React Contest Only Livens Up

In September 2016, Google unleashed a substantially re-worked Angular framework to challenge Facebook's React library and to conquer hearts of frontend web developers. Angular 2 is now a lighter, faster, and more stable JavaScript (JS) framework than ever before. Now is the perfect time to juxtapose Angular 2 and React and figure out how these JS tools differ.

Authored by: RubyGarage


React.js

3 common approaches to side-effects in Redux apps

Working on a Redux app of any complexity, you are almost inevitably bound to do one thing at some point: make a server request and save the results. And the thing is, it can be a little non-obvious as to what to do in a case like this.

Authored by: JavaScript Kicks

Introducing React Loadable

React Loadable is a small library I wrote after getting fed up of you people saying this was hard to do. Loadable is a higher-order component (a function that creates a component) which makes it easy to split up bundles on a component level.

Authored by: James Kyle

10 React mini-patterns

Over the last few years, I’ve worked on a handful of decent-sized React projects, and many, many pint-sized ones. Throughout this magical journey, a number of patterns have come up that I find myself repeating again and again.

Authored by: David Gilbertson

GraphQL & React tutorial (part 5/6)

So far in this series we've concentrated on the smallest possible unit of UI, and built from the component up. Doing so has allowed us to develop each component in isolation, figure out its data needs, and play with it in a component explorer without needing to stand up a server or build out screens.

Authored by: Tom Coleman


Aurelia.js

Aurelia - Early March Mega Release!

Wow! We've got an incredible set of Aurelia releases for you! Today we're pleased to announce the 1.0 release of Aurelia Validation, the Release Candidate of our new Webpack plugin and major updates to the Aurelia CLI.

Authored by: Aurelia

Creating a Minimal Aurelia TypeScript & Webpack Application From Scratch

Today we are going to be creating a Webpack based Aurelia application from scratch. We will be leveraging the newly released Webpack capabilities for this tutorial. Until such time that the Aurelia CLI allows us to build customisable Webpack builds from scratch, we will be doing it manually.

Authored by: Dwayne Charrington


Vue.js

Where Did Vue.js Come From?

Vue.js's popularity has been climbing pretty fast. It has about 3/4 the number of stars on Github as React, and more than double the stars of Angular. The watchers and forks are also pretty comparable.

Authored by: JZ JavaScript Blog

End-to-End Testing Vue.js Apps with TestCafe

End-to-end testing is one of the most valuable tools in your testing arsenal, allowing you to simulate what your user would do as they move through your app and determine if your app is responding correctly to that.

Authored by: Alligator


Node.js

The 80/20 Guide to Async/Await in Node.js

Arguably the biggest new feature in Node.js 7.6.0 is that the much awaited async function keyword is now available without a flag. Callback hell and promise hell are now in the past. But, like Uncle Ben always reminded us, with great power comes great responsibility, and async/await gives you a lot of new and exciting ways to shoot yourself in the foot.

Authored by: Valeri Karpov

Common programmer mistakes when developing REST APIs in Node.js

Sometimes the structures, coding practices and approach to various problems are awe-inspiring, and other times we have slapped ourselves on our foreheads over the horrifying things we’ve uncovered in the codebase.

Authored by: STRV

Lock Down Your Node Modules With NPM Shrinkwrap

You set up a new Node JS project, installed your dependencies with npm install and your app runs smoothly. A week later, you decided to share your awesome project with your colleagues or friends, they cloned it and install dependencies via npm install, then they run the app and all of sudden, errors everywhere!

Authored by: Yongzhi Huang

An Update on ES6 Modules in Node.js

A few months ago I wrote an article describing the various differences that exist between Node.js CommonJS modules and the new ES6 Module system; and described a number of challenges inherent with implementing the new model in Node.js core. Here, I want to provide an update on how things are progressing.

Authored by: James M Snell

Developing a complete REST API with Loopback

Loopback was created as an open source mobile backend-as-a-service framework by Strongloop. It allows you to setup a REST API in minutes and is based on Express.

Authored by: Andy Van Den Heuvel


Functional Programming

FP By Any Other Name...

Don't worry, this is not YAMA (yet another monad article)! Instead, I want to talk about a library I've recently released that offers a helpful twist on typical functional programming ("FP") operations (like map(..), compose(..), etc).

Authored by: David Walsh

Teamwork with the Compiler: An Interview with a Functional Programmer

Peter Jones is a freelance software developer, instructor for DevelopIntelligence/appendTo, and has an incredible assortment of bow ties. He spends his working hours giving in-person software training for DevelopIntelligence, developing software for clients, and contributing to open source projects. Peter is passionate about functional programming and prefers to work in purely functional languages.

Authored by: Kyle Pennell


Testing

Top 5 Most Rated Node.js Frameworks for End-to-End Web Testing

Hello my friends, today we are going to look into the most popular solutions for functional web testing. For my review, I listed the most well-known and popular frameworks, sorted them by the number of stars in their GitHub repos and picked top 5.

Authored by: Medium

Write API Tests with Postman and Newman

Software testing is a common practice these days in many organisations, and for even individual developers. Googling around, you'll find a number of types of software tests that exist to help with this. Postman is a good tool which we mostly use to quickly test APIs to see the result returned by them, but it's actually way more powerful than that.

Authored by: Chris Ganga

Test-Driven Development For JavaScript

JavaScript is handsdown the strangest language I've ever had to test. Its also one of the most popular ones out there right now. The influx of JavaScript developers tells us that a lot of modern-day web development is starting to focus more and more on the frontend.

Authored by: Taylor Jones


Other

"💩".length === 2

It all comes down to codepoints and our friend, Unicode. If you’re a little rusty on the details of Unicode and character sets, stop now, and read The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!).

Authored by: Jon New

Introduction to Polymer

Polymer is a npm package, and in a way, it’s a library that helps you create Web Components, but it’s even more complex than that. It is a whole system (which is maintained by Google) for you to work with Progressive Web Apps.

Authored by: Lila

Playing with CSS Grids

There is a new CSS3 feature getting hotter at the moment and it's for a good reason. That is the new CSS Grid Layout. The CSS Grid Layout has everything it needs to be considered the most powerful layout system in CSS. It is the first CSS module to feature a 2-dimensional system (rows and columns).

Authored by: Marco Barbosa

How to Pass Command Line Parameters to Gulp Tasks

I'm a big fan of Gulp.js and recent surveys indicate almost 44% of front-end developers are using Gulp tasks today. Gulp's simplicity is one of its most attractive features.

Authored by: Craig Buckler

The Document Outline Dilemma

For the past few weeks there has been lots of talk about HTML headings in web standards circles. Perhaps you've seen some of the blog posts, tweets, and GitHub issue threads. Headings have been part of HTML since the very first websites at CERN, so it might be surprising to find them controversial 25 years later.

Authored by: Amelia Bellamy-Royds





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