• CTRL ALT News
  • Posts
  • Conferences (again 😆), Planetscale, AI, and more... This week in web dev (March 8th, 2024) #41

Conferences (again 😆), Planetscale, AI, and more... This week in web dev (March 8th, 2024) #41

Hello friend 👋 , are you excited for the weekend? This Friday I am once again back with another handful of news from the web-dev world. PlanetScale is shutting down its free tier, Vercel just released a new version of their AI SDK, and much more!

Author

CTRL ALT News
March 8th, 2024

To support me:

  • Share the newsletter with your friends, it helps more than you think!

  • Please share your feedback with me!

Many of you probably use, or at least know about PlanetScale. PlanetScale recently announced their plans to kill the “Hobby Tier” for all PlanetScale projects, on April 8th. This means it will no longer be possible to use PlanetScale for free 😥 .

It is possible to upgrade to a paid tier, export your data, and move to a different platform.

The people behind TailwindCSS recently announced version 4 alpha. It is a big update with a lot of features and changes, but here is a rundown of the most important:

  1. New High-Performance Engine: A ground-up rewrite of the engine, built for speed. Up to 10x faster build times, smaller footprint, and parts rewritten in Rust for parallelization.

  2. Unified Toolchain: Tailwind CSS is now an all-in-one tool for processing CSS, with built-in support for imports, vendor prefixing, nesting, and syntax transforms.

  3. Modern Web Features: Support for native cascade layers, explicitly defined custom properties, color-mix for opacity modifiers, and container queries in core.

  4. Composable Variants: New composable variants like group-*, peer-*, has-*, and not-* for more flexibility.

  5. Zero-Configuration Content Detection: Tailwind automatically finds and processes your template files without requiring explicit configuration in most cases.

  6. CSS-first Configuration: Configure Tailwind using CSS variables and the @theme directive instead of a JavaScript configuration file.

Vercel recently announced version 3.0 for their AI SDK, an SDK focused on making AI more accessible for all developers. Here is a quick rundown of some of the features:

  1. Generative UI support: Developers can now stream React Components from large language models (LLMs) to deliver richer user experiences beyond just plaintext or markdown responses.

  2. Integration with OpenAI's Function Calling API: LLMs that support OpenAI's Function Calling API can now retrieve live data and render custom UI components based on that data.

  3. React Server Components (RSC): The new APIs rely on React Server Components, allowing developers to stream UI components directly from LLMs without needing heavy client-side JavaScript.

  4. Improved developer experience: The update simplifies the integration of AI into applications, making it easier to build and maintain AI-powered features.

  5. Compatibility with other frameworks: While the update currently works with Next.js, the APIs are designed to be compatible with other React frameworks like Remix or Waku once they implement React Server Components.

Two weeks ago I told you about the Typescript 5.4 RC (Release Candidate) being released. A few days ago Microsoft announced that Typescript 5.4 is now fully production-ready, and released. Some of the features include:

  1. Preserved narrowing in closures following last assignments - This makes narrowed types persist better within closures, making more JavaScript code patterns "just work".

  2. The NoInfer utility type - This allows better control over type inference to avoid unintended/surprising inferences.

  3. Object.groupBy and Map.groupBy support - TypeScript now has declarations for these new static methods on Object and Map.

Another week, another conference was announced. This time it is VueConf 2024. This year it is taking place in New Orleans, from May 15 to 17. The conference will have a mixed bag of speaks from AI to Nuxt.