JavaScript News and Updates of January 2022

This page summarizes the projects mentioned and recommended in the original post on dev.to

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  • zx

    A tool for writing better scripts

  • It is surprising that the first place in the overall ranking is taken by a new command-line tool named zx with (+24.3k☆). Released last year by Google, it has quickly become a viable option for writing simple command-line scripts in JavaScript and TypeScript. The top three also include the build tool Vite (+21.4k☆), and Next.js (+19.7k☆). Creators of this report also pointed out a number of interesting trends such as the growing popularity of meta frameworks, wider use of Rust language in the JavaScript infrastructure, growing importance of ES modules and edge computing, etc. Read the full report to get more useful information on the subject.

  • colors.js

    get colors in your node.js console

  • Early this month, the malicious attack on free-to-use libraries, namely color.js and faker.js, created a real uproar in the development community. These tools are used in thousands of projects and their downloading rate from npm is estimated in millions per week. To everyone’s surprise, it turned out to be an inside job. Marak Squires, the creator of these libraries, intentionally committed malicious code to his projects and published updated codebases on GitHub and npm. It is said that this sabotage was caused by unsuccessful attempts of Mr. Squires to monetize his projects. Fortunately, malicious packages were quickly removed and the attacker’s account was suspended. The story sparked a new wave of discussion in the development community on possible steps to make the development and maintenance of open-source projects more sustainable.

  • SurveyJS

    Open-Source JSON Form Builder to Create Dynamic Forms Right in Your App. With SurveyJS form UI libraries, you can build and style forms in a fully-integrated drag & drop form builder, render them in your JS app, and store form submission data in any backend, inc. PHP, ASP.NET Core, and Node.js.

    SurveyJS logo
  • Faker.js

    Discontinued What really happened with Aaron Swartz?

  • Early this month, the malicious attack on free-to-use libraries, namely color.js and faker.js, created a real uproar in the development community. These tools are used in thousands of projects and their downloading rate from npm is estimated in millions per week. To everyone’s surprise, it turned out to be an inside job. Marak Squires, the creator of these libraries, intentionally committed malicious code to his projects and published updated codebases on GitHub and npm. It is said that this sabotage was caused by unsuccessful attempts of Mr. Squires to monetize his projects. Fortunately, malicious packages were quickly removed and the attacker’s account was suspended. The story sparked a new wave of discussion in the development community on possible steps to make the development and maintenance of open-source projects more sustainable.

NOTE: The number of mentions on this list indicates mentions on common posts plus user suggested alternatives. Hence, a higher number means a more popular project.

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