Astro 4.0 Release 🎉, Django V5, and In-house Meta tool released. This week in web dev (December 8th, 2023)

Hello friend 👋! I hope you are enjoying the christmas, and maybe some snow 🌨️? I am once again back with some of the latest news in the webdev world for you. This week we got some big releases and updates to software you probably use!

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Astro 4 Full Release

Last week I told you that Astro 4 had just been released into beta. Now Astro 4 has been released officially. With new APIs, faster builds, redesigned docs, and a new unique development tool, Astro 4 is flipping the world of web frameworks on its head.

Django V5

The Django web framework released version 5.0 in December, with enhancements aimed at easier web development. Form rendering and database interactions now have simplified interfaces for common tasks. Faceted filters also arrive in the admin dashboard. Under the hood, dependencies like jQuery are updated as well. Django 5.0 continues the project's emphasis on the rapid building of data-driven sites.

StyleX Open-Source

Meta’s in-house styling solution, which until now has been private, has been publicly released as open-source code. StyleX is not new, in fact, it has been used by Meta for 3 years, so it has been used for production applications for a very long time.

StyleX allows you to define stylings in your JS/TS code and use it in your HTML.

Vercel Speed Insights

Vercel recently updated its speed insights. With this feature, it is possible to manage the performance of your websites over time. It has now been improved with features like:

• Support for all frontend frameworks.

• Updated scoring criteria

• UI improvements

And much more…