#501 — September 12, 2023
MikroORM 5.8 Released — When MikroORM is mentioned anywhere, I always see folks saying it’s great and deserves more attention, so I’m doing my bit to help 😁 It’s an ORM for Node based around Data Mapper, Unit of Work (hello implicit transactions and change detection!) and Identity Map patterns, with support for both SQL and NoSQL databases and it’ll even analyze your code for types to help you create entities more easily.
Martin Adámek
Bun 1.0: The Other JS/TS Runtime That Isn’t Deno or Node — We’re going to focus more on Bun in JavaScript Weekly, but the alternative, performance-oriented server-side JS runtime built atop JavaScriptCore is a big deal in the Node world nonetheless as the only other runtime to claim it’s “a drop-in replacement for Node.js.” It’s worth a look, though folks have had mixed results so far regarding the drop-in claim.
Jarred Sumner et al.
Snyk’s James Konik has attempted a Node vs Deno vs Bun comparison. Hexagon has also created a simple comparison table of features. ✅ ❌
Code Security into Your Apps, Quickly — Pangea helps you create secure apps without slowing down innovation. With our framework of essential API-based security services, you can efficiently protect your users, meet security and compliance standards, and block threats.
Pangea sponsor
How to Run a GitHub Gist with npx — Nate Taras’ recent Creating an npx tool inspired Kelly to send in this simple example of a remotely executable npx gist. This is a clever idea that works because GitHub gists can automatically act as git repositories and npx can run against a package hosted in a git repo.
Kelly Fox
Node v20.6.1 (Current) Released — A patch level release to fix a bug around circular CJS dependencies when loaded by ESM. This issue was significant enough to affect numerous popular projects.
Ruy Adorno and Rafael Gonzag
Getting Daily Notifications My Parent is Okay — Being in the UK – a nation that truly loves its tea – the approach involves monitoring whether a water kettle is used each day. Node makes an appearance for turning the activity into Telegram messages.
Remy Sharp
ASIDES:
Node 16 is now EOL (End of Life) meaning it will get no more updates. Why? OpenSSL, mostly. You can learn more about Node’s release schedule here.
Yagiz Nizipli of Node’s performance team invites anyone interested in helping work on Node’s performance to come along to one of their Zoom meetings. He also notes that 🐦 no-one on the team is paid for their work in response to criticism and claims to the contrary on Twitter/X this week.
Yagiz also began a discussion about removing primordials from Node. An ‘internal use only’ feature, primordials provide a way for core modules to get access to truly clean, underlying objects in Node that aren’t being polluted by other modules or third party code.
JPEG and EXIF Data Manipulation in JavaScript — A look at how to pick through the JPEG format and read and replace EXIF tags directly without leaning on a third party library.
Cédric Patchane
Job Schedulers for Node: Bull or Agenda? — This isn’t an antagonistic title, Bull and Agenda are two job scheduling systems for Node 😉 .. though at this point I’d take Bull’s advice and look at the newer BullMQ instead.
Omonigho Kenneth Jimmy
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FusionAuth sponsor
Running a Playwright Script on AWS Lambda — If you’ve struggled to make it work too, Matt has some pointers.
Matt Steele
Observing Node.js Processes with eBPF
Opeyemi Onikute
🛠 Code & Tools
Semgrep 1.39: Lightweight Static Analysis for Many Languages — Semgrep is a CLI that analyzes your code locally and has numerous pre-built rules (with a repository of others to explore) and a playground to test things out. Think a turbocharged, language aware grep and.. you’ll be about 50% of the way there 😁 (It’s not built with Node but Node is one of its supported and common targets.)
R2C
csv42: Small, Fast CSV Parser with Support for Nested JSON — The author has also blogged about why he built it.
Jos de Jong
Disco Node: Recommendations using Collaborative Filtering — A new Node library from pgvector’s most prolific contributor.
Andrew Kane
quick-lru 7.0: Simple Least Recently Used (LRU) Cache — For when you want to cache, but also place a cap on the size of the underlying object.
Sindre Sorhus
npm-to-yarn: Convert npm CLI Commands to yarn (and Vice Versa)
Ben Gubler
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QUICK RELEASES:
Foal 4.0
↳ TS-based Node.js framework. (Notes.)
node-mssql 10.0
↳ Microsoft SQL Server client for Node.
sqs-consumer 7.3
↳ SQS-based applications without the boilerplate.
easy-soap-request 5.4
↳ Library to make SOAP requests easier.
Mongoose 7.5.1 – MongoDB object modeling library.
ncc 0.38 – Compile a Node module into a single file.
Zettlr 3.0: A Modern Markdown Editor — A rather attractive editor. Bear in mind it’s GPL licensed if you want to integrate it anywhere, but you may find it useful just as a personal editor. GitHub repo and homepage.
Zettlr