Welcome to the inaugural edition of the Friday Frontend Five newsletter, with 5 hot articles and resources to keep you up to date with everything happening in the front-end world.

Happy Friday!
KBall from ZenDev

Simple Server Side Rendering, Routing, and Page Transitions with Nuxt.js

Server-side rendering of javascript frameworks is all the rage. The ideal of an “isomorphic” JavaScript application, one that uses the same JavaScript code on both the server and client has been around as long as Node.js has, starting from the early days of backbone frameworks like Rendr and now every advanced JS framework is working on a server-side rendering approach. In this excellent article on CSS-Tricks, Sarah Drasner walks you through Nuxt.js, a framework for building isomorphic JavaScript applications with Vue.


ES8 was Released and here are its Main New Features 🔥

At the end of June TC39, the committee in charge of the ECMAScript standards, released the latest version of the ECMAScript spec - ES8/ES2017 - containing some amazing new functionality that you can use via Babel TODAY. This is the future of JavaScript, and it’s worth keeping an eye on where it’s going. I’m particularly excited about the async functions and atomic shared memory. JavaScript’s ability to handle intensive parallel and asynchronous processing just keeps going up!


PopMotion: The JavaScript motion engine

For those looking to add a bit more ‘zing’ to their front-end with animations, PopMotion is a great light-weight, simple alternative to the frontrunner library of Greensock. With a simple API, high performance composable actions, and weighing in at less than 75% the size of Greensock in just 9kb, this is an exciting opportunity for anyone starting a new animation project.


Public APIS: A collective list of free JSON APIs for use in web development

With the proliferation of free available APIs, it’s become phenomenally fast to put together “mash-up” applications that provide tons of functionality with minimal work. But how do you learn about what’s available? Or if you have an idea, how do you know where to find the data or relevant API? This is a phenomenal crowd-sourced repository over 300 available JSON APIs, organized by category, covering subjects as widely ranging as Anime to Cryptocurrency.


This in JavaScript

Whenever someone asks me about becoming a JavaScript expert, I ask them how well they understand this in JavaScript. It’s one of the more confusing elements in the language, not least of which because many folks learned JavaScript initially from jQuery which manipulates this all over the place. Even if you have a reasonable understanding, with ES6+, there are even more thissituations to keep track of. In this excellent breakdown, Zell covers every case one by one in detail, so by the end you’ll be a this master.