You can now create .page.md files and use front matter to specify a layout template as well as any other props you want to pass to your layout.
(I’m working on the Kitten web site with docs, etc., so I thought I’d bite the bullet and add this feature this morning to make my life easier. Should make it easier to make this sort of site with Kitten in the future for everyone.)
…command you can use to connect to your Kitten daemon in production to debug it, etc.
Also, I don’t know if I missed something simple but I had a hard time handling Node’s #REPL preview completions over a socket connection. Couldn’t find any docs. Managed to fix it by implementing a control channel to communicate the remote client’s terminal size. Wrote it up here, in case it helps anyone else:
Es scheint so, als müsste ich mich bei der TypeScript Entwicklung auf @deno_land konzentrieren. Sicherlich, noch mit JSR genutzt, mittlerweile ein Ersatz für @nodejs professionell.
»Deno 1.44 lernt den Umgang mit privaten npm-Registries:
Das Minor Release kann mit privaten npm-Registries sowie gRPC-Verbindungen umgehen und erhöht nochmals die Kompatibilität mit Node.js.«
So Kitten’s build process (i.e., the time it takes to build Kitten itself) takes ~0.7 seconds on my ~1 year old desktop (Ryzen 7 5700G 3.8Ghz) vs ~1.4 seconds on my ~3-year-old Starlabs LabTop (renamed to the Starbook thanks to a suggestion by yours truly but sadly, not quickly enough).
So, in summary, it’s bloody fast for something that results in a ~9MB bundle.
Note that when you’re working with Kitten, your apps do not have a build process.
You write HTML, CSS, JavaScript and, optionally, extend using first-class support for htmx and alpine.js as well as Kitten’s own Streaming HTML workflow¹. There’s also no scaffolding or generating a project with hundreds of files or anything. You just write the code for your app.
I find #NodeJS deprecation warnings hit the sweet spot between jarring enough to be annoying and not informative enough to be useful.
So, in Kitten, the first time you hit a deprecation warning, you get a message telling you there are deprecation warnings.
If you care, you can open the interactive shell and view the kitten.deprecationWarnings list, which will show you full details including the stack trace.
• Runtime is now Node 22 (22.1.0 as 22.2.0 has a bug that can crash on deprecation warnings). This might be a breaking change for your code (e.g., import…assert is now import…with, etc.) Remember, Kitten is pre-release/not API-versioned yet.
• Applied all semver-compatible dependency version upgrades.
• Fixed tests & coverage. Tests are still woefully inadequate but will improve.
Got a Playwright question - in my tests I'm clicking a button which in the backend sends an email. I tried to use Jest to mock that function in the backend so it doesn't send an email, but that doesn't seem to work. Should it?
I could check for NODE_ENV in the backend and not send an email, but I'd like access to the email contents in my playwright test, but without actually sending an email.
Kitten now has a lovely new multi-page Settings screen and… drumroll… a new 🐢 interactive shell (REPL) for you to play with the running state of your Small Web site/app/place and debug your app, inspect/manipulate its database, etc.
I plan on recording demos of each of them tomorrow but you can play with them now.
And here’s a little tutorial to get you started with the shell:
LLaVA (Large Language-and-Vision Assistant) was updated to version 1.6 in February. I figured it was time to look at how to use it to describe an image in Node.js. LLaVA 1.6 is an advanced vision-language model created for multi-modal tasks, seamlessly integrating visual and textual data. Last month, we looked at how to use the official Ollama JavaScript Library. We are going to use the same library, today.
Basic CLI Example
Let’s start with a CLI app. For this example, I am using my remote Ollama server but if you don’t have one of those, you will want to install Ollama locally and replace const ollama = new Ollama({ host: 'http://100.74.30.25:11434' }); with const ollama = new Ollama({ host: 'http://localhost:11434' });.
To run it, first run npm i ollama and make sure that you have "type": "module" in your package.json. You can run it from the terminal by running node app.js <image filename>. Let’s take a look at the result.
Its ability to describe an image is pretty awesome.
Basic Web Service
So, what if we wanted to run it as a web service? Running Ollama locally is cool and all but it’s cooler if we can integrate it into an app. If you npm install express to install Express, you can run this as a web service.
The web service takes posts to http://localhost:4040/describe-image with a binary body that contains the image that you are trying to get a description of. It then returns a JSON object containing the description.
Wrote my first programming related blog post in a little while: How to redirect the user back to the previously requested URL after login with Adonis.js: