Hey there!

I missed sending the last newsletter (sorry!), but this week we’re back with some great new updates from the web development ecosystem - so let’s dive right in:

1. NextConf / Next 14

Just last week, Vercel held another iteration of their popular NextJS Conference. The conference featured lots of great talks from people in the community, including on building generative UI with NextJS, optimizing the load of third-party scripts, and my personal favourite from Sam Selikoff: “How NextJS is delivering React’s vision for the future”

They also announced the next (hehe) major release of the framework, Next 14, which marks server actions as stable, greatly improves the upcoming Turbopack bundler to replace webpack, and a new course on learning NextJS from scratch. It might not be the most exciting release in terms of features, but I think that’s a good thing. Next has already changed a lot in the last few years, and sometimes it’s good to slow down and focus on some of the fundamental stuff behind the scenes - like the performance of the App router, which has been highly criticized by developers.

If you’re in the React ecosystem (or just love modern JS-based frameworks), check out the full Youtube videos covering all the talks here and here (timestamped to the talk by Sam I highly recommend watching)

Or, alternatively, read the announcement blog post for NextJS 14 here:

2. Lit 3.0

Another exciting update from the framework space: Lit 3.0 was recently announced, the first major release in over 2 years.

And in case you’re not familiar: Lit is a framework build on Web Components. You know, that thing everybody claims to know, but most people haven’t actually used? But to keep it short, Web Components are a standard for creating reusable custom elements - similar to how React and Vue have lots of component libraries - but the idea being that Web Components work without frameworks. Hence being easy to adopt to any website, regardless of how it’s built.

Web Components are a really neat idea, and Lit builds upon them to make it even easier to design and implement custom functionality as a Web Component that can be shared across projects. If you haven’t already, I’d recommend learning the basics of Web Components and then checking out the Lit project if you’re curious to start building your own with the new version 3.0!

3. New gsap website

The final pick for this week is to celebrate one of my favourite JavaScript libraries of all time - gsap.js.

Gsap is a “wildly robust JavaScript animation library built for professionals”. And it’s great at it. Gsap makes it super easy to implement extremely custom and detailed animations using a few key concepts like tweens and timelines. They also include different plugins to make elements draggable, create scroll-based animations or implementing the FLIP principle for complicated, layout-changing animations.

Now that’s all well and good. Though traditionally, the gsap website and documentation hasn’t really lived up to the great promise and power the library actually has. But that just changed!

A few weeks ago they launched a brand new website that truly showcases the power of gsap for creating wildly custom, experience-driven animations. The docs have been updated to simplify the learning process, and the landing page itself is a work of art. Check it out below and do yourself a favor by playing around with gsap if you haven’t already. It’s seriously one of the coolest tools to have in your toolbox as a front-end developer 🔥

That's all for now - thanks for reading! See you in 2 weeks

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— Mads Brodt