Simon Willison’s Weblog

Observable Framework 1.1 (via) Less than three weeks after 1.0, the 1.1 release adds a whole lot of interesting new stuff. The signature feature is self-hosted npm imports: Framework 1.0 linked out to CDN hosted copies of libraries, but 1.1 fetches copies locally and then bundles that code with the deployed static site.

This works by using the acorn JavaScript parsing library to statically analyze the code and find all of the relevant imports.

# 5th March 2024, 9:12 pm / javascript, npm, observable, mike-bostock, observable-framework

PGlite (via) PostgreSQL compiled for WebAssembly and turned into a very neat JavaScript library. Previous attempts at running PostgreSQL in WASM have worked by bundling a full Linux virtual machine - PGlite just bundles a compiled PostgreSQL itself, which brings the size down to an impressive 3.7MB gzipped.

I built this interactive demo of PGlite using Observable Framework, source code here.

# 23rd February 2024, 3:56 pm / postgresql, observable, webassembly, observable-framework