2 Things that caught my eyes in Frontend Land
Fresh from the oven... a bun!
In September, version 1.0 of Bun was released. So what is this ‘bun’ thing, can we eat it?
Bun is a fast, all-in-one toolkit for running, building, testing, and debugging JavaScript and TypeScript, from a single file to a full-stack application. Today, Bun is stable and production-ready.
The devs behind bun took Apples JavascriptCore and added a lot of ZIG code to build a complete javascript toolkit. It replaces node.js, transpilers, bundlers, package managers and testing libraries.
Although not all FE frameworks are supported yet, I’ve got incredible results when installing projects. But even more important it really felt like a drop in replacement! Getting it to work only takes a couple of minutes.
If you want to speed up your frontend pipelines I highly encourage looking into this tool to manage your packages!
View Transitions
Still experimental but back in March Chrome decided to support it! You can use these transitions to make a web page behave more like an app without adding a bunch of javascript libraries.
Theo updated his astro website to the latest version to test out it’s implementation of this API and it is kind of mind blowing how little work is involved in getting this to work*!
Server Side all the things!
I have been stepping up my NextJS game over the past year, I really like all the magic it does for me and with version 14 its adding Server Actions!
Since v13 introduced server side components I was kind of bummed that I still needed to create an API route to handle my form submission on the server (remember never trust the client).
But no more of this! We can now specify if an action is only available on the server.
Rewrite all things Angular
Angular got a shiny new dev portal. But this is not all, somewhere this month you can expect version 17 to drop. And it comes with loads of new things!
In my opinion the most important change is the new component flow. I’m hoping they have a way to make this migration easy... but I’m worried the new syntax they introduce will require a bit of work.
Up until now you added an ngIf statement to a component in your template to display something based on logic.
<section>
<div ngIf="true">I'm visible</div>
</section>
To make this logic better readable they came with this solution:
<section>
@if (true) {
<div>I'm visible</div>
}
</section>