Frontend Friday 2

It’s time for another post in you favorite series where we dive into some exciting news related to frontend development over the last month. This time we will dive into Angular 8, Ivy, look at what will replace node.js and the next rendering engine for Edge. We will also look at what Myjson is, and why you need it.

TLDR

• Angular 8 bring Ivy with size reductions reaching 93% and 45% faster renders on mobile
• A successor to Node.js is in the works; Deno
• Edge is switching to Blink (the Chrome rendering engine)
• Myjson, a simple JSON store for your web or mobile app

Angular 8 and Ivy

Angular is getting an overhaul with a entirely new rendering engine that will revolutionize Angular and might even make it feel like a new framework, without any breaking changes! The main goal for the new engine is to make the size of the web application smaller, run faster and to be easier to debug. Completing Ivy has become a top priority for Angular as they have temporarily pulled close to the entire Angular Material team to help complete Ivy. They have demoed a hello world application that has a size reduction of 93% and renders 45% faster on mobile! Ivy will be opt in from Angular 8 as its still not completely finished. A full release will probably be ready by Angular 9, at the end of this year.

If you want to know more about ivy, and the rest of the news in Angular 8, then check out these links:

https://blog.angular.io/a-plan-for-version-8-0-and-ivy-b3318dfc19f7

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jnp_ny4SOQE&feature=youtu.be&t=1320

The future of node.js, and it’s successor Deno

Node.js is the foundation of the web as we know it, both on front- and backend. However, Node.js has a couple of issues that originates from its conception. The original creator (which has since left the project) recently had a talk describing the shortcomings of Node.js and his plans for it’s successor Deno (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M3BM9TB-8yA). The project is still in its early stages and is far from ready, but it has already improved on some features compared to Node.js. A few examples include switching to typescript, more use of promises (and async await) and sandboxing the program by default (no disk or network). There have been some negative press around The Node.js community with mismanagement, including being temporarily split into two different projects, and the resignation of one third of it TCS board members in one day(https://www.zdnet.com/article/after-governance-breakdown-node-js-leaders-fight-for-its-survival/ ). It might seem like the perfect time for a successor to Node.js.

You can find Deno here: https://deno.land/

Edges new rendering engine

The Microsoft Edge team has chosen to replace their rendering engine with the same as Chrome is using, Blink (which is a fork of the rendering engine in Safari, WebKit). This may be good news since it will make it easier to make web applications that support multiple browsers. However, this could be the return of 2002 with one browser family having more than 90–95% market share (http://www.onestat.com/html/aboutus_pressbox4.html ) . IE was loved by developers leading up to the total control of the market, and Chrome is in the same position right now. Chrome and Google has already started to exploit their dominance by killing background tabs and forcing us to use AMP (https://medium.com/@uistephen/why-not-google-amp-cf1aeb974463 ). You might approve, or even like those changes, but it might get worse as their market share keeps climbing. Microsoft exiting the rendering engine scene means less competition and more dominance for chrome, which they can potentially exploit. It might be a good time to fall back to Firefox, witch has actually become a great choice over the last year with amazing new features and blazing speed.

If you want to know why Edge is switching to Blink then you should read this post describing how Google used their central position on the web to leave the Edge team with little choice but to switch: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18697824

The cool thing of the month: Myjson

If you’re need of a fast and easy way to store and retrieve JSON for a web or mobile app, you should give myjson a try (http://myjson.com/). Myjson is a simple and clean web app that lets you paste JSON and get a URL in return. You can use this URL to retrieve the pasted JSON in your web or mobile app. This can come in handy when for example developing a website before the backend is ready. The API supports creating, getting and updating JSON data.