Web Tech Newsletter - December 2023
This month, I'm covering new libraries and new releases!
Astro 4.0
Astro is a web framework that targets content-driven websites. It has enjoyed an astronomical rise in 2023 (surely I'm not the first to make that joke?), and continues with this 4.0 release. The most interesting bit to me is the Dev Toolbar. I think it's brilliant because it opens up a whole new avenue for 3rd party integrations. Some of the possibilities in this announcement post include testing, linting, and easily switching between test accounts in development. I like to think of it as a more modern version of Wordpress plugins.
Stylex
Meta released a new player in the CSS game with Stylex in December. It has been powering the web presence every major product at Meta including Facebook and Instagram. I appreciate the CSS-in-JS like syntax combined with static compile time performance benefits. We'll see where this one goes!
Naman Goel
Waku
This is an interesting new project to implement a minimal React framework for using React Server Components. The current aim is to facilitate learning the best practices for building applications with RSCs, and encourage the ecosystem to grow. I think this is fantastic because the best known way to play with RSCs today is through Next.js, which brings along a whole host of other technologies. If you want to focus just on learning about RSCs and what they bring to the table, I strongly recommend playing with Waku.
SvelteKit 2
On the one year anniversary of the launch of SvelteKit, the team has released SvelteKit 2. This is a smaller release, but it sets the stage for Svelte 5 and runes in 2024.
TanStack Router
TanStack Router hit 1.0 in December, and has been getting a lot of love in the web dev world. It combines all the best ideas from other projects like Remix and Next.js and boasts 100% typesafe routes. As an enthusiastic React Router user, I am eager to play with this!
