Somebody please tell em who the F I is

Issue #21.November 9, 2020.2 Minute read.
Bytes

What a week.

Aleph.js - A Bleeding Edge React Framework

Identity Theft

Identity theft is not a joke, Jim

Aleph.js is a new React framework built in Deno that says it’s “inspired by” Next.js. That’s kinda like saying that my high school Biology final was “inspired by” my smart friend’s answers, but we won’t judge if you don’t.

Regardless, the web is a collaborative place and the Next.js team seems cool with Aleph.js “being inspired by” their logo, landing page, and documentation. Maybe that’s because the Next team are good people who believe a free and open internet, or maybe it’s because the Aleph.js docs explicitly recommend deploying your app with Vercel 😉.

Aleph.js has a lot of features you’d expect from a Next clone (SSR & SSG functionality, page-based routing, etc). But there are a few key features that make it unique:

  • It’s Built in Deno — the “simple, modern, and secure” runtime that supports TypeScript out of the box and ships only a single executable file. That means you can say goodbye to package.json and your node_modules directory, because all dependencies are imported as URLs and managed by Aleph.js.

  • It uses the ESM Imports Syntax — which makes it so Aleph doesn’t need to use Webpack or any other bundler.

  • useDeno is a single React hook that lets you fetch data at build time in a component (for SSR) or fetch data asynchronously (for SSG). This is more of a mixed solution compared to Next’s getStaticProps and getServerSideProp functions.

The Bottom Line

Aleph is still in alpha (or aleph-a) and isn’t production-ready yet, but it’s still fun to check out these bleeding edge frameworks and see the Deno ecosystem start to take shape.

Quick question: If Node ==> Deno, shouldn’t Next.js for Deno be called Xtne.js? It’s not too late to do the right thing, Aleph.

Supabase.js 1.0 Released

Nicki Minaj

Somebody please tell em who the F I is

Supabase.js released v1.0 of their backend-as-a-service platform last week, which bills itself as an “open-source alternative to Firebase.”

The creators built Supabase because they loved Nicki “the functionality of Firebase” but were tired of running into scaling issues. So they did what any of us would do in that situation: stitched five open-source tools together into one platform, got into YCombinator, and raised $5.1m of VC, because WTFN.

To improve scalability, Supabase uses PostgreSQL — a relational database with greater functionality than Firebase’s NOSQL. Postgres can be pretty tough to work with, so Supabase built a nice UI around it to give us the best of both worlds: PostgreSQL’s scalability + Firebase’s usability. It’s the Hannah Montana of backend.

If you’ve already played around with the alpha versions of Supabase, you’ll appreciate some of the new features with this v1.0 release:

  • Errors are now returned instead of thrown (less yelling is nice)
  • A new sub-library called for Netlify’s GoTrue auth server called gotrue-js
  • All of Supabase’s custom libraries are now built natively with TypeScript

The Bottom Line

  • Is it cool to have a new, open-source backend platform that isn’t owned by a tech giant? Yes.
  • Doesn’t this seem really similar to Hasura though? Also yes.
  • Will we still be talking about Supabase in 9 years the same way we talk about Nicki’s iconic Super Bass today? You tell us.

Cool Bits

  1. Jason built a site that can instant-search “32 million songs in milliseconds”, and then he immediately got sued by Pied Piper (and Hooli) for IP infringement.

  2. Deno 1.5 came out a couple weeks ago — it was the biggest 1.5 release since Lion King one-and-a-half came out.

  3. Sid created ui-devtools, a visual editor for Tailwind CSS development. It’s also the first time I’ve seen “sponsorware” used as a funding model and I’m here for it.

  4. The Redux team released a complete rewrite of the Redux Fundamentals Tutorial last week. And by “the entire Redux team”, we definitely don’t just mean Mark Erikson and a fridge full of his favorite caffeinated beverages.

  5. Marked is markdown parser and compiler that’s built for speed, unlike Nevada’s vote-counting process.

  6. This GraphQL Editor makes it easier to understand GraphQL schemas by using a visual blocks system that it later transform into code.

  7. eDEX-UI is fullscreen terminal emulator and system monitor that will will make you feel like you’re inside TRON. We’re hoping that v2 will be able to hijack your Spotify and only play Daft Punk.

🔥 JS Tip

You can remove all “falsy” values from an Array by filtering for Boolean.

const friends = [
  'Jake',
  null,
  'Cassidy',
  undefined,
  'Joshy',
  undefined,
  'Jordyn'
]

const filteredFriends = friends.filter(Boolean)
filteredFriends // ["Jake", "Cassidy", "Joshy", "Jordyn"]

This week on ui.dev

We’re to the point where we publish so much content (weird flex) that if we included ourselves in “Cool Bits” it would take up the whole thing. So here’s a new section, just for us.