Future of JS: What to Expect in 2021?

Infancy

There have been many reasons to dislike JavaScript. It’s long been a punching bag by experienced programmers, and those criticisms had validity during its early years. JavaScript was created in 10 days by one guy with absolutely no intention to be widely adopted by every browser. On top of that, it was given the prefix of an already commonly used programming language with a much better reputation (Java). This lead to much confusion and unequal comparisons. Needless to say, not a great start for any language, but it had promise.

Childhood

The first sign of growth was its new ability to validate an HTML form. This was JavaScript’s first taste of pride and a great tool for any website looking to improve its shopping cart checkout process. The immediate feedback to the user led to a better experience and sparked clever ideas from creative developers. These ideas led to niceties, including tooltips, popup modals and accordions, which lead to the creation of many libraries to help create such user interface gadgets.

Adolescence

Like any adolescent, JavaScript was trying to prove itself to be more important than fancy UI gadgets. So it improved security, enhanced performance and added the ability to asynchronously talk to the server, which meant it could be intimately involved with underlying business logic and balance the effort between client and server. This led to more advanced libraries, some of which are still commonly used, such as jQuery.

Adulthood

JavaScript is only getting better with age. It’s proved itself to be a truly viable part of every web application and accepted by programmers old and new. However, to be truly accepted, there are some fundamental qualities that JavaScript still needs.

The new version of JavaScript has some familiar qualities that other respected languages will applaud. Having the ability to cleanly and clearly separate your code and define your dependencies is a proven strategy to avoid regressions and increase code reuse. There are over 20 new features to be excited about. Some are simple syntactic sugar, such as block scoping with “let” and “const,” while others are major advances, such as generators (a function that can return multiple values) and iterators (accessing elements in an iterable fashion).

So How Do We Do It?

As excited as we are to embrace the future of JavaScript, it comes at a cost. It’s not as easy as flipping a switch. We have to build a bridge from our legacy code to the new version. We do this by using a transpiler. The idea is to write code that leverages ES6 capabilities (the new, super cool way) and then run it through an automated process that intelligently changes our super cool code into code that browsers can interpret correctly.

Another tool that is critical for our leap into the future is Webpack. Webpack is a module bundler that has become crucial to our build process. You may recall that Modules are my favorite new feature, but they require some heavy lifting. Since browsers don’t understand how modules rely on each other, we need an automated process to sort all of that out. Webpack does this beautifully. It creates a dependency tree of all of our module code so that it can intelligently bundle it together. Bundling is important because it packages our code into bundles to lessen the amount of requests the browser has to make. With the introduction of Webpack, which plays very nicely with Babel, we are able to separate our code into modules, which leads to better reuse and easier maintainability.

Another great feature of Webpack is its ability to integrate third-party libraries as modules. This opens a whole new realm of possibilities for us as we were eager to adopt the React library as a module. React is quickly becoming the popular choice to build UI components. It brings the idea of modular code to the view layer.

Everyone Wins in the End

The future is bright for JavaScript. The new syntax brings extra functionality, which ultimately leads to quicker development of new features to the user. ES6 also provides more clarity, which contributes to a more stable application. If you are interested in JavaScript development services – get more info here https://fireart.studio/javascript-development-services/.

Michal Kapias

Chief Technology Officer

Software developer deep by heart, loves reusable components. Always put client’s needs in a first place, to find a perfect balance for golden triangle: time, money and functionality.