Last month, Google announced that some of the engineers on its Material Web Components (MWC) team had been reassigned to work on its internal framework, Wiz. That’s led to questions about ongoing support for Angular Material.
MWC is a library of reusable, customizable UI components built on the web component standard. The components follow Google’s Material Design guidelines, making it easier to create a consistent look for web applications.
The team at Angular made it clear this week that Angular Material won’t be impacted by the change because it does not use or depend on MWC. Instead, it uses a library called MDC Web under the hood. Normally, that’s just an internal implementation detail, they said, but the post goes on to explain that MDC is “a set of lower-level pieces that can be combined into components.”
“Angular started incorporating MDC Web years ago, and Angular Material v15 made the components based on top of MDC Web the default,” the post noted. “Recently, in order to iterate more rapidly, rather than continuing to import MDC directly, the team is currently working to fork the code we depend on from MDC Web and will be iterating on it inside Angular Material going forward.”
The change is not expected to have an impact on component APIs or their rendered output.
The popular JS framework Astro has a new official SDK, @clerk/astro, which allows developers to add authentication and authorization into Astro applications.
Clerk is a user management platform. The SDK ships with Clerk’s UI components, middleware, and low-level utilities for custom flows, the Clerk team said in the changeling.
A quick start guide is available to help developers explore the offering.
MeteorJS is an open source, full-stack JavaScript framework designed for building real-time web and mobile applications. It can handle both client-side and server-side logic using JavaScript.
The framework released version 3.0 this week, with the big news being that it now integrates with Node.js 20 and Express. The Node.js integration brings several enhancements to Meteor, including:
This update allows Meteor to fully take advantage of the latest features and performance improvements in Node.js 20, the team wrote.
“The adoption of Express in Meteor 3 opens up new possibilities for developers, especially when building RESTful APIs or serving static files,” the team added. “Express is a minimal and flexible Node.js web application framework that provides a robust set of features for web and mobile applications.”
In addition to Express and Node.js, there were several architectural changes that the team said would modernize the platform and improve its performance and scalability, including:
Reddit made the list this month by nagging mobile browser users with constant interruptions to download its app. And the list wishes you good luck on canceling that DoorDash subscription.
The Dark Patterns Hall of Shame includes dark patterns and unethical designs found on popular sites. The catalog breaks objectionable practices down into “Bait and Switch,” “Nagging,” “Disguised Ads,” and my personal favorite, “Privacy Zuckering,” in which a service or a website tricks you into sharing more information with it than you really want to.
Reddit is the most recent addition to the catalog of offenses, but the entire list has several new entries from 2024 and is worth a quick read for a laugh — or to make sure you’re not committing an offense.
