Hot New Web Dev – October 2024

Welcome to Hot Web Dev October 2024, featuring the latest technology and web development news. This month we check out Svelte 5 and the new CLI which aims to speed up development by reducing set-up time. We feature an in-depth section on JavaScript and the tool of the month will bring your web app to a desktop or mobile near you.

Svelte 5 Released

Yay, Svelte 5 has been released with many improvements over previous versions, including runes using them for declaring reactive state as a mechanism. Runes are similar to signals used in other frameworks. This was featured in the recent release of the Svelte 5 Guessing Game.

Alongside the new version, the website has been refreshed combining Svelte and SvelteKit documentation to offer more consistency with a new font. A new command-line interface (CLI) has also been released to help build projects quicker by taking the heavy work out of manually installing a framework such as Tailwind or Drizzle ORM.

Learning Resources – JavaScript

JavaScript has transformed the web by making it dynamic, interactive, and highly responsive. Originally, web pages were static documents, meaning each user interaction required a full page reload from the server. JavaScript changed this model in several important ways.

Client-Side Interactivity

JavaScript enables users to interact with web elements in real time without reloading the page. This ranges from actions, like button clicks or hover effects, to validating forms on the client side before submission, improving user experience by providing immediate feedback on errors.

Asynchronous Data Loading with AJAX

Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX) allow web pages to request and retrieve data from the server in the background without refreshing. This became the backbone of modern web applications, enabling smoother, faster interactions.

Single Page Applications (SPAs)
Frameworks like React, Angular, and Vue have made SPAs possible. SPAs load a single HTML page and dynamically update the content as users navigate within the app, providing a more seamless user experience.

Real-Time Communication
Technologies like WebSockets allow real-time communication between the browser and the server. This is essential for chat applications, live sports scores, collaborative tools, and gaming.

Cross-Platform Compatibility
JavaScript works across different operating systems and browsers, making it the language of the web. Browsers come with built-in JavaScript engines, allowing developers to write code that runs on virtually any device with a browser.

Modern Development Ecosystem
Modern frameworks like Node.js brought JavaScript to the server side, expanding its use to backend development.

Mobile and Hybrid Applications
React Native and Ionic allow developers to build mobile applications for Android and iOS using a single codebase, reducing development time and resources.

Once you have mastered the basics you might want to learn a framework such as Next JS to build your first server-side app.

WOW Tool Of The Month

So you have built a front-end web app and want to turn it into a cross-platform native application that runs on Mac, Windows, Linux, Android and iOS. Tauri is built using Rust and uses Microsoft Edge WebView2 on Windows, WKWebView on macOS and webkitGTK on Linux.

This makes it lighter on system resources as it doesn’t bundle the libraries with the app. It is dynamically linked during the runtime. Tauri is similar to Electron, a powerful cross-platform alternative that has been in development since 2013 and uses the Chromium browser engine and Node. Version 2 of Tauri has recently been released.

It supports HTML, CSS and vanilla JS alongside frontend frameworks including the popular Vue, Svelte and many more. It can hook into Node, using Sidecar and has plugins to connect to the file system, database, and clipboard. New features include hooking into the biometrics and NFC on handheld devices using Android and iOS. You can also set your Tauri app as a default on Windows and Linux.

The Best of the Rest in October 2024

• 7 Ways I Use My Raspberry Pi to Improve Productivity
• The Top 15 Common Errors in WordPress Web Design
• LocalStorage vs. IndexedDB vs. Cookies vs. OPFS vs. WASM-SQLite
• Data Structures and Algorithms (DSA) in Java 2024 (Video)
• A CheatSheet of 128 CheatSheets for Developers