It’s the summer (at least here in the Northern hemisphere), which often leads to slow(er) news days. That’s ok after the madness that was May and it gives us the opportunity to catch our breath and explore some of the new releases from Astro, Docusaurus, UIX and TanStack Start or give htmx a shot. Read on for details.
– Brian
What’s Good
htmx: Simplicity in an Age of Complicated Solutions
htmx is a library that let’s you access to AJAX, CSS Transitions, WebSockets and Server Sent Events directly in HTML via attributes. Erik argues that this can offer a solution to some of the unnecessary complexity of JavaScript SPA frameworks for many use cases. He digs into detail about how it works and why he thinks it’s worth exploring.
Erik Heemskerk
Sponsor
Efficient Development Starts with Composable UI
Optimize your workflow as you build dynamic storefronts with Composable UI. Explore its open source React and Next.js libraries, built on award-winning foundations, and develop with greater efficiency. Spin it up, extend it, and make it your own.
The Astro Content Layer
The Astro team is sharing some of the features that they are working on for 2024 in a series of posts. This one covers an improved content layer that would be able to work with different sources of content beyond just local Markdown files, including an external headless CMS. They are also working on zero-JavaScript view transitions.
Fred Schott
New Frameworks
The New Stack wrote about two new frameworks. UIX is a new full-stack framework built upon Deno for developing reactive web apps with restorable and shared state. Loraine spoke to the creators about the project. And TanStack has introduced a new React meta-framework based on its router called TanStack Start and Loraine talks to the TanStack creator about his plans for the project’s upcoming release.
Loraine Lawson
Tools, Resources & More
Astro 4.10 includes an experimental built-in module make it easier use of environment variables and rewrites for all HTTP methods.
Docusaurus 3.4 allows you to create a list of predefined tags and an experimental hash router for offline browsing.
Vercel Functions now have faster and fewer cold starts by utilizing bytecode caching that can result in 27% faster cold starts.
Starlight, the documentation site generator built on and by Astro, turned one year old.
Adding the Stackbit visual editor to your projects on Netlify has been streamlined with new functionality.
Zach leatherman was on the JS Party podcast to talk about taking Eleventy independent and making it self-supporting.
Tidbits
Why We Need a Standard JavaScript ORM for SQL Databases
Paul argues that having a standard way of communicating with SQL databases from JavaScript could be a huge benefit and that Drizzle ORM may offer that via it’s ability to integrate with potentially any database provider.
Paul Scanlon
React 19 – New Hooks Explained with Examples
Exploring the new useFormStatus, useActionState, useOptimistic and use hooks.
Kunal Nalawade
Getting Started with Appwrite (Part 1/4)
A multi-part series on building an application using Appwrite as a backend-as-a-service (BaaS) including auth, data, functions and storage.
Thomas Findlay
Five Years Running a News Site on JAMStack
Spotlight PA is a news site for Pennsylvania and this initial post in a multi-part series is the story of how an initial prototype built with Hugo ended up becoming a permanent solution and some of the trials and tribulations of their CMS and deployment processes.
Carlana Johnson