Rete is a modular framework for visual programming. Rete allows you to create node-based editor directly in the browser. You can define nodes and workers that allow users to create instructions for processing data in your editor without a single line of code.

Metaflow is a joint effort by Netflix and AWS that attempts to solve the discrepancy between what data scientists care about and what they spend their time doing (pictured below). Get the backstory on Netflix’s technology blog.

KBall, Divya, and Chris talk about what’s going on in all the big frontend frameworks, share some pro tips, and shout out awesome people and things in the community.

Mat Ryer, Mark Bates, Johnny Boursiquot, and Aaron Schlesinger discuss web development in Go. Go is great at writing server technology, but how good is it for web development? We’ll talk about HTTP, templating, the front-end, Wasm, and we even discuss Buffalo with its creator, Mark Bates.

Typescene is a robust front end library written in TypeScript: strongly typed, no dependencies, no nonsense. It’s really great for desktop-like (or mobile) applications, not so great for blogs and other content. It isn’t backed by some major corporation, not even a startup, but it’s been built by me: one developer on a mission to build a no-nonsense dependency-less framework

The author’s journey is noteworthy, but if you’re mostly wanting to know if this particular framework speaks to you, jump directly to its list of goals.

Flutter for web is a code-compatible implementation of Flutter that is rendered using standards-based web technologies: HTML, CSS and JavaScript. With Flutter for web, you can compile existing Flutter code written in Dart into a client experience that can be embedded in the browser and deployed to any web server. You can use all the features of Flutter, and you don’t need a browser plug-in.

This means Flutter is now on mobile, web, desktop, and embedded systems. What surprises me is how dedicated to Dart Google seems to be, despite community malaise and the success of TypeScript.

After several months of being just days away, we are over the moon to announce the stable release of Svelte 3. This is a huge release representing hundreds of hours of work by many people in the Svelte community, including invaluable feedback from beta testers who have helped shape the design every step of the way.

Lots of folks (myself included) have been eagerly awaiting this release after Rich teed it up on The Changelog #332. We’d love to hear your first impressions!

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before…the difference is DeskGap leverages the operating system‘s webview instead of baking a browser in with it (like Electron).

DeskGap is a framework for building cross-platform desktop apps with web technologies (JavaScript, HTML and CSS).

To enable native capabilities while keeping the size down, DeskGap bundles a Node.js runtime and leaves the HTML rendering to the operating system‘s webview.

When you hard-attach your library to a specific technology or framework, you limit its potential impact. By thinking ahead and putting in a little more effort, your library could benefit orders of magnitudes more people.

Jerod and Adam talked with Rich Harris –a JavaScript Journalist on The New York Times Investigations team– about his magical disappearing UI framework called Svelte. We compare and contrast Svelte to React, how the framework is embedded in a component, build time vs. run time, scoping CSS to components, and CSS in JavaScript. Rich also shares where Svelte v3 is heading and the details on Sapper, a framework for building extremely high-performance progressive web apps, powered by Svelte.

I’ve been using Semantic UI for years. Still do to this day. Unfortunately, the project hasn’t been sustainable with a BDFL despite Jack Lukic’s efforts (you can read a lot more on that history right here).

These things happen. And when they do, it’s awesome to see the community rally around the project and keep it alive and thriving. That’s exactly the case with Fomantic UI. Let’s be clear: this is no hostile takeover. From the README:

NOTE: Fomantic was created to continue active development of Semantic-UI and has the intent to be merged back into the master repository once active development can restart.

Let’s hope the two can become one flesh at some point in the future. In the meantime, Fomantic is where the action’s at.

Elixir gets its very own UI framework focused on connected devices (IoT). Scenic apps run identically across operating systems, including MacOS, Ubuntu, Nerves/Linux, and more.

Notably, Scenic does not use any browser technologies. Learn all about it in Boyd Multerer’s ElixirConf 2018 talk.

Umi is based on routing, supports next.js-like conventional routing, and various advanced routing functions, such as routing-level on-demand loading. Then with a complete plugin system, covering every life cycle from source code to build product, umi is able to support various functional extensions and business needs, currently umi have almost 50+ plugins in both community and inside company.

The aim of Bash Infinity is to maximize readability of bash scripts, minimize the amount of code repeat and create a central repository for a well-written, and a well-tested standard library for bash.

It seems to me that by the time you need something as fancy/full-featured as this, maybe the task at hand has outgrown Bash? Cool, nonetheless. 👍

Masonite works hard to be fast and easy from install to deployment so developers can go from concept to creation in as quick and efficiently as possible. Use it for your next SaaS! Try it once and you’ll fall in love.

KBall, on Vue’s ⭐️ count surpassing React’s:

Don’t get me wrong, I love Vue - I’ve been using it far more than React recently - but github stars are more of a measure of the “hipness” of a project than its actual use.

He backs that up by citing the preposterously low number of stars ‘earned’ by the Apache web server, which powers ~38% of websites. What is a useful metric, then?

There is no perfect measure - there are many many ways to install and use any of these projects - but NPM has become the de facto standard for installing JavaScript packages. If we look at download statistics for the core package of each of these frameworks - the vue package and the react package, that should give us a reasonable proxy for actual use.

Click through for his detailed findings, but the big takeaway is right there 👆 in the headline.

Well, Gatsby is officially a startup! They just announced the formation of Gatsby Inc. and have raised a $3.8M seed round to fund the effort. Wow, congrats Kyle and team.

Kyle Matthews writes on the Gatsby blog:

I’m thrilled to announce the formation of Gatsby Inc. Based on the open source project Gatsby I founded, Gatsby the company will make feature-rich and blazing-fast websites easier to build and run.

What is Gatsby?

Gatsby is…

• a blazing fast static site generator for React.js
• a powerful and flexible modern website framework that simplifies every step of starting, developing and running websites
• helps you leverage open source innovations in the React, NPM, and Gatsby communities for your web projects
• lets you pull data into pages from WordPress, Drupal, Contentful, markdown—and any other data source you can imagine
• compiles and optimizes your site’s code to make your sites lightning fast—even on mobile

This is a lot like Ruby on Rails (even with ActiveSupport & ActiveRecord built-in), but instead of views you have replies. It works for both voice-based and text-based bots and has NLP offerings baked in too. 🍰

The only bummer is that service integrations are currently limited to Facebook Messenger and Twilio SMS. That’s pretty normal for a new open source offering, though, and it’s a great place to hop in and contribute. ✊

Suz Hinton, Alex Sexton, and Nick Nisi talk with Dylan Schiemann about Dojo 2.0, managing an open source project, web standards, and more.

Nick Nisi:

Dojo is a progressive TypeScript framework for building modern web apps with a focus on developer ergonomics!

Dojo is one of the Originalist Gangstas in the JavaScript space. We’re in talks to do a JS Party all about this release. Is that something you’d want to hear?

Proton Native looks full of potential:

1. Same syntax as React Native
2. Works with existing React libraries such as Redux
3. Cross platform
4. Native components. No more Electron
5. Compatible with all normal Node.js packages

This is the 2nd (1st here) Electron-less desktop UI framework I’ve logged in the past week. Are we seeing a rising trend or merely coincidence?

I think we’ve linked to this before, but it’s worth sharing again as people have continued to add implementations. The conceit:

While most “todo” demos provide an excellent cursory glance at a framework’s capabilities, they typically don’t convey the knowledge & perspective required to actually build real applications with it.

RealWorld solves this by allowing you to choose any frontend (React, Angular 2, & more) and any backend (Node, Django, & more) and see how they power a real world, beautifully designed fullstack app called “Conduit”.

It’s so cool that you can plug and play different front ends (13 so far) and back ends (32!) and the app will continue to work because they all conform to the same API.

Ryan Bigg has been toying around with Hanami (an alternative Ruby web framework). In this post, he shares the top three things he likes about Hanami and contrasts them to Rails. To sum it up:

There’s a few places where your mind has to change into the “Hanami Way”, but ultimately once your mind does that you’ll realise that the Hanami way is better.

This tweet from Dan Dean, an engineer at Simple, made me lol.

How your web application makes it through the framework wars