Next.js 14, Netlify Now Supports Bun And More Big Releases. This Week In Web Development (October 27, 2023).

Hello friends! The weekend is getting close, but I am still ready with a set of web developer news from last week. Although things have been slow this week, I still found some of the best stories for you all to enjoy! Have a great weekend 😃!

Don’t forget, we got this week’s discount too 🤫!

Next.js Conf

Vercel, the team behind Next.js, among other products, is back with their annual “Next.js Conf” conference. This year they have another stacked panel, everyone from “Guillermo Rauch”, the CEO of Vercel, to ThePrimegen and Theo3.gg, well-known figures in the content creation space around Next.js.

This year’s conference highlights are Next.js 14, and the Turbopack build-tool.

To learn more, you can visit the official Next.js conference website.

Next.js 14

The highlight of highlights at the Next.js conference this year is the announcement of Next.js 14. Some of the key features in Next.js 14 include:

• Turbopack (Stable) - Next.js's underlying Rust-based compiler is now stable. In benchmarks, it improved local server startup time by up to 53% and code update speed with Fast Refresh by up to 94%.

• Server Actions - Allows calling functions on the server directly from React components. This simplifies server-side interactions like submitting forms.

• Partial Prerendering - A new optimization that sends a fast initial HTML response with static content, then streams in dynamic content. This combines the benefits of static generation and server-side rendering.

• Faster Builds - Next.js 14 has an 80% smaller function footprint for basic apps, resulting in faster builds.

• New Learn Course - Next.js released a free interactive course covering topics like authentication, databases, and more.

More can be learned here.

Netlify Reveals Bun Support

Netlify announced at their recent conference that their managed build service Netlify Builds now natively supports Bun.

Bun is an all-in-one JavaScript and TypeScript runtime and package manager. It aims to improve performance and simplify tooling for web development. Key capabilities provided by Bun include faster package installs, a unified runtime for running builds, and improved compile speeds. Now Bun's runtime can be used directly in build commands, and its package manager will be automatically detected.

To learn more, read Netlify’s article here.

Astro 3.4

The Astro team announced the release of Astro 3.4, which includes new features like page partials, image optimization improvements, and an experimental dev overlay.

Page partials allow rendering just a fragment of HTML from a page component. This is useful with progressive rendering libraries like HTMX that fetch HTML fragments. Any page can be marked as a partial by adding export const partial = true in its frontmatter.

Image optimization is now concurrent, speeding up build times for sites with many images. Astro will also reuse image buffers to improve performance with multiple variants of the same image.

An experimental dev overlay was added that allows inspecting page islands and auditing performance. A plugin API was included so developers can build integrations for the overlay.