~javascriptweekly | Issue 731 - Comparing Tauri and Electron (14)

🤖 Firebase Studio: Google's New Agentic AI-Powered Development Environment — Buzzing from the success of Gemini 2.5 Pro for dev tasks, Google’s Firebase team gets in on the AI development action with a Cursor/v0/Lovable-a-like of its own for building apps in the browser.

Some Features Every JavaScript Developer Should Know in 2025 — A quick list post breezing through a few more modern areas of JavaScript including iterator helpers, structuredClone(), and set operations.

Next.js Fundamentals, v4 — Master Next.js with Scott Moss. Learn React Server Components, Server Actions, dynamic routing, authentication, caching, and edge functions. Create a modern React app, deploy it to Vercel, and level up your skills.

Node.js Testing Best Practices — A detailed guide to modern testing in Node from a group of developers who know all about it. It’s on GitHub, but essentially written like a free book covering over 50 battle-tested tips covering areas as diverse as the ‘Testing Diamond’, testing microservices, and simulating flaky networks.

Comparing Tauri and Electron for Building Desktop Apps — Electron is a natural choice for building JS and HTML-powered cross-platform desktop apps but numerous alternatives have appeared like Neutralinojs and the Rust-based Tauri. This post does a good job of quickly showing how Tauri differs and why you might choose it.

Mastering Default Values with Nullish Coalescing (??) — Matt’s a big fan of the ?? operator over the || approach, largely due to JavaScript’s ideas of what it considers ‘falsy’.

How Clerk Integrates with a Next.js Application Using Supabase — Learn how Supabase + Clerk work with Next.js to increase security and reduce development hours.

Accelerating Large-Scale Test Migration with LLMs — How Airbnb completed its first large-scale, LLM-driven code migration in moving from Enzyme to React Testing Library.

React Reconciliation: The Hidden Engine Behind Your Components — React uses a reconciliation algorithm to update the DOM based on changes to the virtual DOM. Understanding how it works is essential for producing faster apps.

Hiding Elements That Require JavaScript Without Using JavaScript — If you’ve got non-essential features that require JavaScript and you want to hide them for users who have JavaScript disabled for whatever reason, this is a tidy old-school way to do it.

Next.js 15.3: Now Including Turbopack Builds — The popular React framework now includes alpha support for using Turbopack for much faster production builds (especially if you have lots of cores available), community support for Rspack, and new navigation hooks.

Chrono 2.8: A Natural Language Date Parser — Give it a string like “today”, “last Friday”, “2 weeks from now”, or even an entire date and time, and it’ll come up with a date object to suit.

Breakpoints and console.log Is the Past, Time Travel Is the Future — 15x faster JavaScript debugging than with breakpoints and console.log, supports Vitest, Jest, Karma, Jasmine, and more.

🎵 Communicate with Ableton Live via WebSockets — Ableton Live is a popular DAW (digital audio workstation) and this opens up a way to control it from JavaScript.