Javascript: The Future

Javascript, the language that gave new life to the web. It changed the way how websites worked and functioned. I’ll say, it took out the dullness and turned the web into something more aesthetic and exciting.

But I won’t forget and i know, similiar to me many of the web developers won’t forget those old javascript days, made you tear your hair out, because in those days a web developer was also suppose to take care of the cross browser compatibility, which used to be a big pain. sometimes working on some browsers and failing on some, burning the midnight oil debugging.

Then came in Jquery, the awesome thing to happen, all praises to John Resig for the invention. Implementing new functionalities became much easier. For the web developer it brought back fun to the work. You wouldn’t want to imagine a developer’s life without jQuery. And now it has become a de facto for the web.

Adding more to the fun and ease, a new language, coffeescript, its nothing but a syntactic rewrite of javascript. The syntax is inspired from python and ruby, the coffeescript compiler converts the wriiten code to javascript and also maintains the compatibility. For newbies, coffeescript is much easy and fun to learn, but don’t just directly jump onto coffeescript, because in case of errors or failures you may get badly stuck debugging it. I am sure The guys behind coffeescript will come up with some solution for debugging.

The fun doesn’t stop here, to simplify the coding and still tackle the complex issues and design great UX, we got javascript frameworks, backbone.js the popular one, SproutCore, JavascriptMVC, Ember.js, Angular.js, Batman.js, etc. There are many more. You’ll just need to  read the info on their sites, view a few examples, this will help you narrow down on selecting the appropriate one for your project.

The only part that was lacking for javascript, there was nothing on the server side, all these,  i spoke about till now, work on the client side. But, you wish, and here comes in node.js, the server-side javascript framework, a big thanks to Ryan Dahl, for the innovation, many web developers had been waiting for.

Its driven by asynchronous design, It is said, that building real time applications is much easier, Its fast as compared to other popualr web servers, reading and writing to database is also much faster as compared to other programming language frameworks. I have not explored much deep it into it. But, companies like lnkedin, LocalResponse, IrisCouch and Voxer, have been using node.js to build much optimized lare-scale applications.

For a bit more information, i would recommend this inspiring article from VentureBeat ‘How LinkedIn used Node.js and HTML5 to build a better, faster app‘.

I forgot, a grateful thanks to Brendan Eich, the inventor of Javascript. Its clearly evident, till there is javascript, the web will continue to evolve into something more elegant, innovative and engaging.

photo source: wikipedia