News: Smaller images via Jpegli, Val Town Raises $5.5M, and Declarative Routing in Next.js

Front-End Fire

The group dives into the week’s news right away, starting off with a new open source project from Google called Jpegli. Jpepgli is a new JPEG coding library, which claims to compress images up to 35% smaller while also being able to deliver JPEGs in even higher quality than what is currently available today. The GitHub repo the article links to still looks to be in the early stages of development, but this could be a new solution for JPEGs, which traditionally can take quite a bit to load in the browser depending on their size and resolution.

The next topic for discussion is a company called Val Town that’s raised $5.5M in funding. The premise is that users can write small snippets of code in Val Town’s online platform and Val Town will run them in serverless functions and do things like send HTTP requests, run scheduled cron jobs, send emails, and users of the platform can see the “vals” and comment on them, like them, etc. It remains to be seen how much traction this will generate in the web development world, but it seems like an interesting concept lowering the barrier to entry for folks who aren’t coding professionals.

Jack shares his new declarative routing library for Next.js as another interesting bit of news for the week. Type safe routing in packages like React Router and Tanstack Router are becoming the preferred method of writing routes, but it’s still a very manual process without a lot of autocompletion and input validation that we’ve come to expect in TypeScript code today, and the Declarative Routing library aims to bring that same level of comfort and coding niceties to routes in Next.js. It’s also OSS, so if you’re interested in contributing to open source, check it out!

Finally, Cloudflare made the announcement that they’ve acquired OSS platform PartyKit. PartyKit, started by former Cloudflare employee Sunil Pai, is focused on making real-time, collaborative, multiplayer functionality within apps easy. It handles that aspect through the use of Cloudflare Durable Objects and Cloudflare Workers, so that developers can focus on the logic that makes their apps unique, and it seems like a well-made match to bring PartyKit under the official Cloudflare umbrella. The future roadmap is focused on integrations with popular frameworks like React, Vue, and Angular, so expect to hear more about this in the future.

News:

• Paige - Google introduces Jpegli, a new JPEG coding library
• Jack - Jack Herrington’s declarative routing library
• TJ - Val Town Raises $5.5M

Bonus News:

• Cloudflare acquires PartyKit

What Makes Us Happy this Week:

• Paige - Fallout TV series
• Jack - Photography
• TJ - The Guest List

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