If you’re a sports fan, you may be familiar with “March Madness”, where the NCAA basketball tournament means that there are so many games going on that it can be hard just to keep up. Well, as we reach the end of the month, I feel like it’s been “May Madness” when it comes to full-stack and Jamstack application development. There have been so many new releases, major announcements and other news this past month that it’s been tough to keep up. This issue is no exception. So, forgive me for bombarding you with links this week, but I didn’t want you to miss anything.
– Brian
What’s Good
Next.js 15 RC
Vercel hosted their Vercel Ship event in NYC last week and the biggest news was probably the release candidate for the next major release of Next.js which includes support for the React 19 RC including the new Actions and the new React Compiler. There were a ton more Vercel announcements as well around feature flags and firewall that you can read about via the recap. In related news, check out the 5 big things from React Conf via the Bytes newsletter as well as an update adding some clarity regarding the status of Remix and React Router.
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I Need Your Help to Make 11ty Fully Independent and Sustainable in 2024
In other big news, Zach Leatherman announced that he is now working independently on 11ty and is looking for project sponsors and supporters to make this financially sustainable. You can support the project via Open Collective. This follows on the first ever 11ty conference. If you missed it, catch the keynote on the future of 11ty.
Zach Leatherman
It’s not just you, Next.js is getting harder to use
This is an interesting perspective on a hot topic of late. Andrew’s take is that the move to the App Router added a lot of overhead in terms of what the developer needs to understand to use Next.js well while making complex features that are prone to mistakes opt-out instead of opt-in. In a somewhat related article, Richard MacManus explains that Vue is trying offer an alternative to React’s complexity.
Andrew Israel
What’s new in JavaScript Frameworks
Yes, JavaScript frameworks seem to be changing fast, but, as this post shows, they are converging around a similar set of mature feature-sets. This post details those features as well as some of the unique aspects of 7 of the most popular ones. Want help choosing which one you should use? Steven Carr list 5 things to consider when evaluating a frontend framework.
Katie Hempenius and Addy Osmani
Tools, Resources & More
SolidStart 1.0 takes a very unique approach by being a metaframework that allows you to bring your own framework (or not, if you don’t want to). It includes things like file-based routing (though you can bring your own router) and SSR.
Angular v18 brings experimental “zone-less change detection”. This removes zone.js for change detection and should improve the developer experience and performance.
Astro 4.9 adds React 19 support for Astro Actions and an experimental container API that allows you to render Astro components outside of an Astro application, which can make it easier to test components.
RedwoodJS v7.6.0 adds an experimental setup command for React Compiler to the CLI and other fixes and improvements.
The Enhance TypeScript Starter allows you to generate an Enhance project from the CLI that is built with TypeScript.
Tidbits
Bun - A fast-rising star?
An initial exploration of Bun by running some performance tests to compare it to both Node.js and Python. The results were somewhat surprising.
Will McKenzie
Adding Recommendations to my Blog with Algolia
How to use Algolia’s recommendations API to recommend blog posts similar to the one you are reading.
Raymond Camden
Middleware in the Frontend? Tool Helps Manage Webhooks on Vercel
A new open source middleware by Hookdeck aims to help developers manage asynchronous events on Vercel.
Loraine Lawson