JavaScript Evolution: from scripting language in 1995 through Ajax, jQuery, Node to JS frameworks and libraries in 2015

JavaScript is celebrating 20th anniversary in 2015. It’s a language with a changeable history and carries a lot of baggage from its childhood, but as it leaves its teenage years behind it, now it’s a language that has finally grown up. JavaScript made a revolution in web by allowing scripts to run in a browser. But after its initial popularity soon the reputation was spoiled and JS was often associated with poorly written, cut-and-pasted code that was used to create annoying pop-ups and cheesy ‘effects’. Thus we see that JavaScript had some annoying weaknesses as a programming language.

On the other hand, we can observe that JavaScript has “ubiquity” that other programming languages don’t have. One must admit that you just need a browser to run, which means that anyone with a smartphone or computer is capable of running a JavaScript application. JavaScript has made the dream true that Java was available on all platforms by using the browser as its virtual machine. And now thanks to Node.js, it can run without a browser.

It is well known fact that simple text editor – is all you need to write a program in JS. JavaScript has a low barrier to entry when it comes to development. And we also must agree with GitHub that JavaScript is one of the most popular languages. This means that help is often easy to come by and there is a lot of JavaScript code out there. Furthermore, one should not forget that it also means that code’ libraries are well tested and many issues have already been solved.

After a first decade, which was a period of awkward childhood, JavaScript was growing up like most of the teenagers. People changed their mind with the revolutionary advent of Ajax. jQuery then made people using JavaScript to build some new applications and Node has taken it all to a whole serious level. JavaScript established itself as a powerful and flexible language with some cool features such as:
– Prototype-based Inheritance
– Closures
– JSON (subset of the object literal notation of JavaScript)
– Asynchronous event-driven programming
– Functions as objects

Frameworks and Libraries

Lots of frameworks and libraries have been written to mitigate problems and improve JavaScript for programming. JavaScript framework is the set of pre-written JavaScript code that helps to ease development of the JS based applications. This framework is also known as JavaScript libraries, which enhance the use of this programming language in many ways.
We have already shared some posts about the JavaScript frameworks in the past. JavaScript framework can be found anywhere on the web with different type of working capabilities. We have selected few of them to keep an eye on, and we hope you will find our compilation useful.

1) Angular.js

Open-source web application framework. It aims to simplify both the development and the testing of such applications by providing a framework for client-sidemodel–view–controller (MVC) and model–view–viewmodel (MVVM) architectures, along with components commonly used in rich Internet applications.

2) Ember.js

Open-source JavaScript application framework, based on the model-view-controller (MVC) pattern. It allows developers to create scalable single-page web applications by incorporating common idioms and best practices into the framework.

3) Meteor (MeteorJS)

Open-source JavaScript web application framework written using Node.js. Meteor allows for rapid prototyping and produces cross-platform (web, Android, iOS) code. It integrates with MongoDB and uses the Distributed Data Protocol and a publish–subscribe pattern to automatically propagate data changes to clients without requiring the developer to write any synchronization code. On the client, Meteor depends on jQuery and can be used with any JavaScript UI widget library.

4) Backbone.js

JavaScript library with a RESTful JSON interface and is based on the model–view–presenter (MVP) application design paradigm. Backbone is known for being lightweight, as its only dependency is on one JavaScript library, Underscore.js. It is designed for developing single-page web applications, and for keeping various parts of web applications (e.g. multiple clients and the server) synchronized. Backbone was created by Jeremy Ashkenas, who is also known for CoffeeScript.

5) Knockout.js

JavaScript implementation of the Model-View-ViewModel pattern with templates. Main principles are: a clear separation between domain data, view components and data to be displayed; the presence of a clearly defined layer of specialized code to manage the relationships between the view components. These features streamline and simplify the specification of complex relationships between view components, which in turn make the display more responsive and the user experience richer.

6) Ext JS (Sencha Ext JS)

JavaScript application for building interactive cross platform web applications using techniques such as Ajax, DHTML and DOM scripting. Ext JS includes interoperability with jQuery andPrototype.

7) D3.js (D3)

JavaScript library for producing dynamic, interactive data visualizations in web browsers. It makes use of the widely implemented SVG, HTML5, and CSS standards. It is the successor to the earlier Protovis framework. In contrast to many other libraries, D3.js allows great control over the final visual result.

Conclusion

JavaScript will be one of the most important languages to learn and invest into over the next few years. Website development is into a single-page web application that relies on JavaScript to do the heavy lifting on the client side (in this case, usually JS goes with modern front-end frameworks such as Backbone or Angular.js). The advantage of using Isomorphic JavaScript is increasing the popularity of JS. The data that is transported from databases is often stored in JSON format. The possibility of using a combination of HTML, CSS and JavaScript let you build an application for iOS, Android and FireFox OS. JavaScript has existing libraries, plugins, APIs and other cool stuff to be broad used in The Internet of Things (IoT). JavaScript is becoming the language not just for the front and back end of web development, but also for interacting with a huge number of modern devices.

To sum up, I must admit that now is the perfect time to get started with JavaScript projects, as it moves into its 20s, and has finally grown up for starting to go places!
What are your opinions about JavaScript future, its libraries and frameworks? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.