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Pavel Lazarev
Pavel Lazarev

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JavaScript News, Updates, and Tutorials: November 2024 Edition

November has been an exciting month for the DHTMLX team and the overall JavaScript community, with the series of updates from DHTMLX, Webix, SVAR, Angular, and TypeScript that web developers won’t want to miss. This digest arrives on Black Friday — a day known for its great deals and opportunities. As anticipated as pleasant discounts, these updates complemented with useful materials on JavaScript promise to boost productivity and enhance your projects, making them worth exploring. Let’s unpack this month’s highlights!

New Releases and Updates

Meet Brand-New DHTMLX Booking Widget 1.0

DHTMLX Booking is a new widget in our product line of JS tools designed to speed up the development of online booking systems for the web. This widget has a user-friendly UI with two main sections — filtering area and cards list with time slots. It offers plenty of options for configuring the booking structure as needed.

For instance, the rich API allows specifying rules for time slots and filtering settings, thereby securing seamless and productive appointment management. DHTMLX Booking is also notable for simple styling with CSS variables and localization support. To make the most of this product, you should consider combining it with the time-proven DHTMLX Scheduler. These tools can be easily integrated and synchronized within a single app, becoming a solid foundation for an advanced scheduling solution. This blog post will give you a complete picture of this product.

Other DHTMLX Updates: Suite UI Library 9.0 and Kanban 1.6

The DHTMLX release schedule in November included two more significant events. In addition to the Booking widget, our development team also prepared updates for Suite and Kanban libraries.

DHTMLX Suite v9.0 is a big step forward in the development of the top-requested Suite widget — JS data table. It received several highly-anticipated features in v9.0, becoming an all-encompassing solution for data management in business apps.

First, we merged the TreeGrid widget into Grid, enabling it to handle hierarchical data. The ability to process tree-like structures is at the core of the key Grid feature added in v9.0, namely, row data grouping. This novelty is a powerful instrument for analyzing large datasets and detecting patterns that usually count when making decisions. Another essential feature of this release is the ability to specify custom stats functions and render the totals of data calculations. You can also enhance accuracy and consistency in data grids and forms built with DHTMLX by setting specific formats for entered data with input masks.

DHTMLX Kanban 1.6 introduces a pack of targeted improvements that will add more setup and personalization options at your disposal. For instance, there are templates for column headers and search results, new options for opening and displaying the Kanban editor, simplified voting for tasks, and settings for displaying users assigned to tasks. Using these features, you can also enhance the usability of DHTMLX-based Kanban boards.

As a bonus, we also rolled out a new project management demo app that is a great example of how our products can be combined to deliver real-life solutions of any scale with minimum time and effort.

Webix 11.0 Release

Webix presented a number of updates in the core and complex widgets of the library. The enhancements equip users with a wider variety of tools for data manipulation, report and file management, as well as extended export-import to/from Excel capabilities.

Let’s have a look at the key features of the Webix v11.0:

  • Core Updates: support of the recent version of PDF.js, export of images, frozen rows and columns to Excel, auto mode to have the page orientation option available in a browser;

  • Report Manager: reports as standalone widgets;

  • File Manager: extended filters for searching files;

  • SpreadSheet: export of SpreadSheet images to Excel (available in the core), possibility to get a cell reference from a cell id in a table, import of filters from Excel, export of frozen rows and columns to Excel (available in the core), searching for and replacing data in cells, filtering math methods by category, highlights for math methods.

To learn more about Webix updates read the release article.

SVAR UI Widgets: New React Gantt Chart and Svelte 5 Compatibility

This month, SVAR introduced two major updates. First, the new Gantt chart for React has been released — an open-source, interactive Gantt chart component that helps developers quickly integrate project workflow visualization into React apps. The component offers customizable UI, responsive design, fast performance with large datasets, and 2 sleek themes: light and dark. In addition, SVAR Svelte UI components have been upgraded to support the latest Svelte 5.

Angular 19 is Generally Available Now

Getting to the top of popularity is one thing, yet quite another to remain on a high level for a long time in a competitive environment like web development. And the Angular team knows it very well. It is hard to call Angular a favorite front-end framework among web developers, but it is still a decent choice for complex, enterprise-grade apps. Regular updates help stir the public’s interest in the project. In November, the world saw the release of Angular 19. This major update is aimed at making Angular more developer-friendly and performant. This list of novelties includes partial and incremental hydration, route-level render mode, linked signals, event replay, and much more. Find more in the release article.

Introducing TypeScript 5.7

Many JavaScript developers say that once you try coding with TypeScript, you’ll never want to switch back to plain JS. TypeScript is especially admired for its reliability, scalability, and developer experience. This month, more reasons to enjoy TypeScript have emerged with its update to version 5.7. The new TypeScript version provides an updated mechanism for checking never-initialized variables aimed to help avoid runtime errors. You should also pay attention to such novelty as path rewriting for relative paths. Now, TypeScript also supports ES2024 features, enabling devs to benefit from the latest JS capabilities. Check out the primary source on the TypeScript blog for more information on v5.7.

Useful Tips and Articles

Benefits of Using JS To Do List for Implementing GTD System

Getting Things Done (GTD) is a popular methodology adopted by individuals and professionals across various fields to improve their time management and productivity. Various tools can be used for the practical implementation of GTD, but a to-do list is often viewed as the most appropriate option, as it aligns perfectly with its structure. To make it work on the web, you can use DHTMLX To Do List. This article highlights the main aspects of GTD and how our JS solution will help you make the most of this methodology.

Useful JavaScript SEO Tricks

Some devs underestimate the importance of JavaScript SEO, but it plays an important role in how search engines index and rank web apps. If JavaScript is used in apps without SEO optimizations, web projects usually lose visibility and traffic. This article provides a range of useful SEO tricks for JavaScript content.

Less-Known But Useful JavaScript Features

Learning JavaScript is an unending journey since its ecosystem is constantly enriched with new features and tools. So it is not surprising developers may overlook some less popular, but still useful JS features and not use them in their projects. The author of this video offers a list of such features and explains them.

Getting Deeper Insight into JavaScript Symbols

JavaScript symbols are unique identifiers serving as object keys to exclude property name collisions. They are especially useful when extending objects without interfering with existing code or working with shared libraries. If are not quite familiar with the concept of JS symbols, check out this article, where the subject is covered with great examples.

Impact of Using GitHub Copilot on Code Quality

It is just amazing how fast AI tools have become an indispensable part of modern technology stacks. GitHub Copilot is a striking example of such a tool used for writing code. But there remains the question about the efficiency of such tools. The recent GitHub study addresses this question and proves the positive impact of such tools on the development flow. Check out the results for more information.

That’s it for now. Stay tuned for more DHTMLX releases and JavaScript news.

This article was originally published on Medium.

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