Open-source web framework Astro released the beta of Astro 4.0 Monday, along with updates to Astro 3.6.
The plan for Astro 4 is to bring in some new features out of the experimental status and mark them as stable, according to the team. Astro 4.0 also includes the latest version of Vite 5, released last month. Vite is the internal build tool for Astro.
“As Vite 5 is also a small major, most projects will be able to upgrade to Astro 4 with only minimal changes to your code if any at all,” the team wrote.
Astro is designed to deliver performance for content-heavy websites, such as blogs. It plays in the same realm as Next.js, Sveltekit, Nuxt.js, and SolidStart.
Details of the Astro 4.0 and Astro 3.6 updates are available in the release notes.
This week at ReInvent, AWS released two SDKs to general availability — one for Rust and one for Kotlin, which competes with Flutter.
The Rust SDK is designed to be used for production workloads and allows developers to deploy AWS services and APIs with Rust.
“AWS SDK for Rust provides idiomatic, type-safe API and supports modern Rust language features like async/await, non-blocking IO, and builders,” the release noted. “It supports access to 300+ AWS Services, each with their own crate.”
The SDK is extensible and can be customized. Users can compile crates only for the services they use and, of course — it’s designed to be fast. With the Rust SDK, users can transfer data to and from Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), and Amazon DynamoDB.
The Kotlin SDK is designed to be used for production workloads.
“AWS SDK for Kotlin has been designed from the ground up to give you an idiomatic Kotlin experience, including concise yet expressive Domain Specific Language (DSL) builders and first class support for asynchronous AWS service calls using coroutines,” AWS noted. “Today’s release enables developers to target the JVM platform or Android API Level 24+, with support for additional platforms like Kotlin/Native coming in future releases.”
On Wednesday, JavaScript runtime Deno released a new tool for creating schedule jobs called Deno Cron. It promises to simplify creating cron jobs and make them cloud-hostable without any configurations.
In a blog post about the release, the Deno team explained Deno.cron() is a function that takes three parameters:
name , which is the name of your scheduled job;schedule, which uses the Unix cron format and where the time is in the UTC timezone; andhandler, a function that is executed on the schedule provided.However, unlike cron on UNIX/Linux, Deno Cron executions do not overlap, the team added.
“This means that if you schedule something to run every 10 minutes, but the task takes 30 minutes to complete, Deno Cron automatically skips the next scheduled run until the task is complete,” they wrote. “Overlapping cron jobs can lead to unintended issues and requires extra tedious logic to avoid, but Deno Cron side steps that completely.”
JavaScript developers will be interested to know that Deno is working on a way to support a JavaScript friendly API for specifying the cron schedule.
Deno Deploy automatically detect and manages Deno.cron (). Deno Deploy is Denos’ multi-tenant distribution serverless JavaScript platform. The blog post explained a bit about how it does this without a web server handling requests.
“When a new production deployment of your project is created, an ephemeral V8 isolate is used to evaluate your project’s top-level scope and to discover any Deno.cron definitions,” the post noted. “A global cron scheduler is then updated with your project’s latest cron definitions, which includes updates to your existing crons, new crons, and deleted crons.”
“The global cron scheduler is a reliable service that’s responsible for scheduling and dispatching cron jobs based on the specified schedule. During dispatch, an on-demand v8 isolate is spun up to execute the job using the same production deployment.”
FusionAuth is a customer identity platform for developers. This week, the company announced enhanced performance and scalability for webhook signing and search APIs. These changes will eliminate barriers for large-size customers, it noted in a prepared statement, “by delivering frictionless authentication and suer management for any application at scale.”
“Although native identity platform tools provide some basic functionality for developers building cloud applications, these options are limited with poor performance and are unable to scale to support large customer bases,” FusionAuth stated. “Other legacy providers offer expensive solutions that can quickly become cost-prohibitive.”
FusionAuth’s new webhook and API functionality is designed to overcome this problem. Specifically, the platform improved performance for deployments with more than one million users. Also, the user and entity search APIs now support a new value that can be prompted to produce the entire available result set.
The change removes previous search limitation while improving performance and scalability, accordion to Dan Moore, FusionAuth’s head of Developer Relations.
“Many of our customers are supporting apps with millions of users, and they need to query user and entity data or sync such information quickly and effortlessly across systems,” Moore said in a press release. “These updates make their lives easier.”
JetBrains issued its WebStorm 2023.3 release candidate this week, and it includes the JetBrains AI Assistant plugin. Webstorm is an integrated development environment for JavaScript.
The AI assistant can help with code generation within the editor, and provides a context-aware AI chat to answer project-related questions.
This release candidate also includes:
Developers must have an active WebStorm license to use the release candidate, although there is a a 30-day free trial to install and run the build.
