ESLint Tag

Top 10 npm packages for Node.js framework

Node is a leader in the asynchronous framework market. The platform now supports a huge portion of startups and businesses that are earning hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue. Thus, it establishes itself as a platform that can sustain a huge load, whilst retaining smooth performance. Node.js was perhaps the biggest revelation of modern server engineering that we saw. By the looks of it, Node isn’t stopping any time soon; it’s the exact opposite. The project continues to push out frequent updates and maintains old releases to support older platforms. A new release secures some loopholes in OpenSSL, but also adds more support for languages like C and C++.

Starting with Node.js is a fairly easy process; the guidelines are outlined and thousands of projects are sitting on GitHub, waiting for you to inspect and analyze their architecture. Node.js works great on all platforms, even on Windows 10, for those who are interested. That makes it a truly great platform to begin learning front-end and back-end development together. Let’s not forget that Node has the most populated package manager of any framework or language known to man. Thus, building a website takes only a couple of minutes, thanks to the modules and libraries that are available through the package manager(NPM). So let’s get started with the topmost packages of nodeJS.

Express

Pic courtesy: medium.com

All common programming languages share similar structures in the way things are built. One of the fastest ways to get a programming language to serve your needs is through a framework. Express is the leading Node.js framework for quickly creating and publishing applications and APIs. The framework’s minimal structure allows any Node.js developer to quickly launch a functional application with the use of Express Generator. Express gives you a solid outline to build your apps on top of. Combine it with any of the other packages we will discuss, and you will quickly realize just how amazing this framework truly is.

PM2

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Node.js is known for being the framework to use for scaling large applications, and infrastructure. Process management should be an essential priority for any Node.js user. PM2 offers both process management for production applications, and a load-balancer to help with any possible performance tweaks. With PM2, your applications stay online indefinitely, giving you the tools to reload apps without having to experience any sort of downtime. Is it a surprise that hundreds of thousands of Node.js users consider this an essential tool to have?

Mocha

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Even more asynchronous action going on here in this Node.js package roundup, this time we have Mocha – a feature-rich JavaScript test framework running on Node.js and the browser, making asynchronous testing simple and fun. Mocha tests run serially, allowing for flexible and accurate reporting, while mapping uncaught exceptions to the correc t test cases. Testing is so important to understand how well the application is performing, where we can locate any particular leaks, and also to know how we can improve these bugs, problems, and irritations that we experience. Testing lets developers to understand better how their code performs, and in turn learn more skills as they continue down their chosen path.

Lodash

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A modern JavaScript utility library delivering modularity, performance & extras. Lodash makes JavaScript easier by taking the hassle out of working with arrays, numbers, objects, strings, etc. Lodash’s modular methods are great for:

• Iterating arrays, objects, & strings
• Manipulating & testing values
• Creating composite functions

ESLint

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ESLint is a static code analysis tool for identifying problematic patterns found in JavaScript code. Rules in ESLint are configurable, and customized rules can be defined and loaded. ESLint covers both code quality and coding style issues. Inshort the goal is to make code more consistent and avoiding bugs. In many ways, it is similar to JSLint and JSHint with a few exceptions:

• ESLint uses Espree for JavaScript parsing.
• ESLint uses an AST to evaluate patterns in code.
• ESLint is completely pluggable, every single rule is a plugin and you can add more at runtime.

Passport

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Passport is a unique authentication module for Node.js devs. The main goal of Passport is to help with authentication requests, this Passport achieves through the use of third-party plugins that act as authentication methods, otherwise known as strategies. The Passport API is straightforward, you give Passport a request that you need to authenticate, the Passport in turn gives you the hooks that let you control what happens after an authentication call fails, or succeeds. Exploring the Strategies, there are hundreds of authentication methods to choose from, starting from internal ones, all the way up to external ones like Google, Facebook, and others.

Moment

One of the most stable & maintained time manipulation libraries you can find. In the whole collection of libraries, created to solve the issues of formatting, parsing, converting and, generally, working with different forms of time, Moment.js is the one that has seen the widest adoption.

import moment from "moment";
// in relation to release date of this post
moment().format("MMMM Do YYYY"); // June 6th 2019
moment("20111031", "YYYYMMDD").fromNow(); // 8 years ago
moment().subtract(10, "days").calendar(); // 05/27/2019

With its latest v2 release, Moment.js got rewritten, to support latest ES6 syntax. This brings improved modularity and better performance for always-green browsers. Such things are important, especially when dealing with a library as big as Moment.js.

Chalk

With Chalk, we’re entering the world of terminal-related tools and libraries, where a number of downloads, and thus popularity, go crazy! Chalk is an extremely simple library, created for one, simple purpose – styling your terminal strings! Just like with Require – it proves that the most useful things are also the simplest ones.

import chalk from "chalk";
// string concatenation - template literals
console.log(`${chalk.blue("Hello")} World${chalk.red("!")}`);
 
// chainable API
console.log(chalk.blue.bgRed.bold("Hello world!"));

Of course, the API is simple, intuitive (chainable) and it works really well with all features that JS has to offer natively. The official page of the packages states that it’s used by more than 20K different packages! Maybe that’s where the weekly downloads count comes from (~25M). Even though, such numbers cannot be ignored.

Socket.io

Socket.io is just happened to get early access to the Nodejs package that allows you to build a truly real-time communication application that would require real-time streams of data content, either directly from the data that you are working with, or through an Application programming interface(API) that comes from another source. Some example apps like Twitter, they deployed a bot for collecting the latest tweets and on Facebook, bot for watching the news, thus with the combinations of APIs to explore some interesting things that work with data in real-time.

Request-Promise

Request is designed to be the simplest way possible to make http calls. It supports HTTPS and follows redirects by default. You can also stream a file to a PUT or POST request. Although it’s deprecated still the most useful package for network calls. few usages are listed below,

• Crawl a webpage
• GET/POST something from a JSON REST API
• POST like HTML forms do (also with Include a cookie)
• Get the full response instead of just the body

For more information and to develop web application using Node JS, Hire Node Developer from us as we give you a high-quality product by utilizing all the latest tools and advanced technology. E-mail us any clock at – hello@hkinfosoft.com or Skype us: “hkinfosoft”. To develop custom web apps using Node JS, please visit our Hire Node Developer technology page.

Content Source:

1. laravel-news.com

What’s JSX Transform?

Browsers don’t understand JSX out of the box, so most React users rely on a compiler like Babel or TypeScript to transform JSX code into regular JavaScript. Many preconfigured toolkits like Create React App or Next.js also include a JSX transform under the hood.

Together with the React 17 release, we’ve wanted to make a few improvements to the JSX transform, but we didn’t want to break existing setups. This is why we worked with Babel to offer a new, rewritten version of the JSX transform for people who would like to upgrade.

Upgrading to the new transform is completely optional, but it has a few benefits:

• With the new transform, you can use JSX without importing React.
• Depending on your setup, its compiled output may slightly improve the bundle size.
• It will enable future improvements that reduce the number of concepts you need to learn React.

This upgrade will not change the JSX syntax and is not required. The old JSX transform will keep working as usual, and there are no plans to remove the support for it.

React 17 RC already includes support for the new transform, so go give it a try! To make it easier to adopt, after React 17 is released, we also plan to backport its support to React 16.x, React 15.x, and React 0.14.x. You can find the upgrade instructions for different tools below.

Now let’s take a closer look at the differences between the old and the new transform.

What’s Different in the New Transform?

When you use JSX, the compiler transforms it into React function calls that the browser can understand. The old JSX transform turned JSX into React.createElement(…) calls.

For example, let’s say your source code looks like this:

import React from 'react';

function App() {
  return <h1>Hello World</h1>;
}

Under the hood, the old JSX transform turns it into regular JavaScript:

import React from 'react';

function App() {
  return React.createElement('h1', null, 'Hello world');
}

Note
Your source code doesn't need to change in any way. We're describing how the JSX transform turns your JSX source code into the JavaScript code a browser can understand.

However, this is not perfect:

• Because JSX compiled into React.createElement, React needed to be in scope if you use JSX.
• There are some performance improvements and simplifications that React.createElement does not allow.

To solve these issues, React 17 introduces two new entry points to the React package that are intended to only be used by compilers like Babel and TypeScript. Instead of transforming JSX to React.createElement, the new JSX transform automatically imports special functions from those new entry points in the React package and calls them.

Let’s say that your source code looks like this:

function App() {
  return <h1>Hello World</h1>;
}

This is what the new JSX transform compiles it to:

// Inserted by a compiler (don't import it yourself!)
import {jsx as _jsx} from 'react/jsx-runtime';

function App() {
  return _jsx('h1', { children: 'Hello world' });
}

Note how our original code did not need to import React to use JSX anymore! (But we would still need to import React in order to use Hooks or other exports that React provides.)

This change is fully compatible with all of the existing JSX code, so you won’t have to change your components. If you’re curious, you can check out the technical RFC for more details about how the new transform works.

Note
The functions inside react/jsx-runtime and react/jsx-dev-runtime must only be used by the compiler transform. If you need to manually create elements in your code, you should keep using React.createElement. It will continue to work and is not going away.

How to Upgrade to the New JSX Transform

If you aren’t ready to upgrade to the new JSX transform or if you are using JSX for another library, don’t worry. The old transform will not be removed and will continue to be supported.

If you want to upgrade, you will need two things:

• A version of React that supports the new transform (currently, only React 17 RC supports it, but after React 17.0 has been released, we plan to make additional compatible releases for 0.14.x, 15.x, and 16.x).
• A compatible compiler (see instructions for different tools below).

Since the new JSX transform doesn’t require React to be in scope, we’ve also prepared an automated script that will remove the unnecessary imports from your codebase.

Create React App

Create React App support has been added and will be available in the upcoming v4.0 release which is currently in beta testing.

Next.js

Next.js v9.5.3+ uses the new transform for compatible React versions.

Gatsby

Gatsby v2.24.5+ uses the new transform for compatible React versions.

Note
If you get this Gatsby error after upgrading to React 17.0.0-rc.2, run npm update to fix it.

Manual Babel Setup

Support for the new JSX transform is available in Babel v7.9.0 and above.

First, you’ll need to update to the latest Babel and plugin transform.

If you are using @babel/plugin-transform-react-jsx:

# for npm users
npm update @babel/core @babel/plugin-transform-react-jsx

# for yarn users
yarn upgrade @babel/core @babel/plugin-transform-react-jsx

If you are using @babel/preset-react:

# for npm users
npm update @babel/core @babel/preset-react

# for yarn users
yarn upgrade @babel/core @babel/preset-react

Currently, the old transform (“runtime”: “classic”) is the default option. To enable the new transform, you can pass {“runtime”: “automatic”} as an option to @babel/plugin-transform-react-jsx or @babel/preset-react:

// If you are using @babel/preset-react
{
  "presets": [
    ["@babel/preset-react", {
      "runtime": "automatic"
    }]
  ]
}

// If you're using @babel/plugin-transform-react-jsx
{
  "plugins": [
    ["@babel/plugin-transform-react-jsx", {
      "runtime": "automatic"
    }]
  ]
}

Starting from Babel 8, “automatic” will be the default runtime for both plugins. For more information, check out the Babel documentation for @babel/plugin-transform-react-jsx and @babel/preset-react.

Note
If you use JSX with a library other than React, you can use the importSource option to import from that library instead - as long as it provides the necessary entry points. Alternatively, you can keep using the classic transform which will continue to be supported.

ESLint

If you are using eslint-plugin-react, the react/jsx-uses-react and react/react-in-jsx-scope rules are no longer necessary and can be turned off or removed.

{
  // ...
  "rules": {
    // ...
    "react/jsx-uses-react": "off",
    "react/react-in-jsx-scope": "off"
  }
}

TypeScript

TypeScript supports the JSX transform in v4.1 beta.

Flow

Flow supports the new JSX transform in v0.126.0 and up.

Removing Unused React Imports

Because the new JSX transform will automatically import the necessary react/jsx-runtime functions, React will no longer need to be in scope when you use JSX. This might lead to unused React imports in your code. It doesn’t hurt to keep them, but if you’d like to remove them, we recommend running a “codemod” script to remove them automatically:

cd your_project
npx react-codemod update-react-imports

Note
If you're getting errors when running the codemod, try specifying a different JavaScript dialect when npx react-codemod update-react-imports asks you to choose one. In particular, at this moment the "JavaScript with Flow" setting supports newer syntax than the "JavaScript" setting even if you don't use Flow. File an issue if you run into problems.

Keep in mind that the codemod output will not always match your project's coding style, so you might want to run Prettier after the codemod finishes for consistent formatting.

Running this codemod will:

• Remove all unused React imports as a result of upgrading to the new JSX transform.
• Change all default React imports (i.e. import React from “react”) to destructured named imports (ex. import { useState } from “react”) which is the preferred style going into the future. This codemod will not affect the existing namespace imports (i.e. import * as React from “react”) which is also a valid style. The default imports will keep working in React 17, but in the longer term we encourage moving away from them.

For example,

import React from 'react';

function App() {
  return <h1>Hello World</h1>;
}

will be replaced with

function App() {
  return <h1>Hello World</h1>;
}

If you use some other import from React – for example, a Hook – then the codemod will convert it to a named import.

For example,

import React from 'react';

function App() {
  const [text, setText] = React.useState('Hello World');
  return <h1>{text}</h1>;
}

will be replaced with

import { useState } from 'react';

function App() {
  const [text, setText] = useState('Hello World');
  return <h1>{text}</h1>;
}

In addition to cleaning up unused imports, this will also help you prepare for a future major version of React (not React 17) which will support ES Modules and not have a default export.

For more information and to develop web application using React JS, Hire React Developer from us as we give you a high-quality product by utilizing all the latest tools and advanced technology. E-mail us any clock at – hello@hkinfosoft.com or Skype us: “hkinfosoft”. To develop custom web apps using React JS, please visit our technology page.

Content Source:

1. medium.com