#734 — May 2, 2025 |
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JavaScript Weekly |
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GSAP v3.13: JavaScript Animation Set Free — Last year the popular GSAP (a.k.a. GreenSock) animation library was acquired by Webflow and as of this new version the entire GSAP toolkit is freely available (including formerly paid addons like MorphSVG and SplitText) even for commercial use. If you're unfamiliar with GSAP and want to see some of what it can do, they have a showcase, lots of code demos, and amazing docs. Cassie Evans and Jack Doyle |
💡 Take care with the license though. GSAP is not formally 'open source' but has a ‘no charge’ license that prevents you using it to directly compete with Webflow. |
![]() AG Charts: The Best JavaScript Charting Library in the World — Create beautiful JavaScript Charts in minutes with our open-source library. Built by AG Grid, AG Charts has an intuitive, flexible API, 20+ series types and advanced features, including Financial Charts. Supports React, Angular & Vue. Try for free. AG Charts sponsor |
Converting Values to Strings in JavaScript — When Dr. Axel says “converting values to strings in JavaScript is more complicated than it might seem”, I’m inclined to believe him. An interesting poke about into something seemingly simple you might not think about very much. Dr. Axel Rauschmayer |
📉 Giving V8 a Heads-Up: Faster Startup with Explicit Compile Hints — A look at a V8 optimization that lets you direct V8 to eagerly compile specific files as a way to speed up startup. It ships with Chrome 136 and the performance gains are more compelling than you might expect. Marja Hölttä |
IN BRIEF:
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RELEASES:
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📖 Articles |
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Export Google Analytics Data to Google Sheets via Apps Script — Google Apps Script is a JavaScript-based platform for dynamically automating tasks in all sorts of Google apps. Here’s how to use it to bring Google Analytics data into a Google Sheet. Kayce Basques |
Building an Offline-Friendly Image Upload System — How to leverage PWA tech such as IndexedDB, service workers, and the Background Sync API to help improve the reliability of web apps for users, particularly those with unreliable internet connectivity. Amejimaobari Ollornwi |
How to Take Clerk to Production — How to take a Clerk app to production with custom domains, OAuth credentials, and DNS setup. Clerk sponsor |
What Does React's Dan Abramov |
📄 Deno’s Decline? – A critical view of Deno’s Deno Deploy edge platform which has been steadily dropping regions. David Bushell 📺 How to Detect Memory Leaks in Your Web App Decoded Frontend 📄 Pwning the Ladybird Browser – The vector is Ladybird’s LibJS JavaScript engine. Jess |
🛠 Code & Tools |
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PDFSlick 3.0: View and Interact with PDF Documents in JS Apps — A full-featured PDF viewer for React, Solid, Svelte and vanilla JS apps. Built on top of PDF.js, it offers a wide array of features from simple PDF viewing to working with multiple and large documents with annotations. Demo. v3.0 bumps up to PDF.js v5 with ICC profile support, better JPEG 2000 support, and improved rendering of large pages. Vancho Stojkov |
Koa 3.0: The Expressive HTTP Middleware Framework — Koa first appeared a decade ago as a ‘next-generation’ Web framework that shared some of the lineage of Express.js, but leaning on more modern JS features. While Express has been making a comeback, Koa remains a compelling alternative. Koa contributors |
Your Terminal, Evolved — The new agentic CLI from AWS works with you to write files locally, run bash commands, or call AWS APIs. Start for free! Amazon sponsor |
Seyfert: A Framework for Building Discord Bots — Create bots for the popular chat system starting from bots that respond to simple commands up to creating components and getting user input. Supports Deno, Bun, and Node. socram03 |
Storybook 9 Beta — A strong step forward for the UI ‘frontend workshop’ with several experimental features from Storybook 8 becoming stable. v9 has a strong focus on component testing, plus React Native support. Michael Shilman |
PGlite 0.3: Postgres but in WebAssembly — A WebAssembly-based build of the Postgres SQL database meaning you can run it wherever WebAssembly can be run (such as in the browser as in this demo). ElectricSQL |
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📢 Elsewhere |
A quick roundup of other interesting updates and useful resources from across the broader developer landscape:
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