

Ask HN: What is the current state of the JavaScript ecosystem? - brwr

	I want to know more about JavaScript and what's going in the JavaScript world, but I don't even know what the latest technologies are.
So what technologies are there? What do they do well? What are they lacking? Why has JavaScript become so popular over the last couple of years and what changes can we expect to see going forward? In short, tell about the current state of the JavaScript ecosystem.
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dominic_cocch
JavaScript is going very strong these days, mostly because it's the language
of the web. Every browser supports it natively, and the language has only
gotten faster as client compilers get better.

Some tech to check out: \- jQuery for DOM manipulation (interacting with HTML
quickly and effectively) \- Underscore.js for a nice toolkit of often-used
utilities \- node.js for running a server, which means you can have JS on both
the client and the server. \- Backbone.js/Angular.js/Ember.js (and others) are
Javascript MV*s: that make large, single page apps like Pandora faster, more
maintainable and easier to build.

Things to look forward to: ECMAcsript 6 and 7 are in the works and include
tons of new features: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECMAScript>

ASM.js was recently created by Mozilla and it allows near-native speed using
pure JS to run things like Unreal Engine inside the browser without the need
for plugins: <http://ejohn.org/blog/asmjs-javascript-compile-target/>

Even more standardization. IE has finally become a fairly standards compliant
browser, so JS in this browser is very likely to work in any modern browser.
Coding standards are also more common and are held to more often.

Personally, the worst thing about JS in the browser is that you have to deal
with the DOM. The DOM is a smelly old piece of crap that acts differently in
different browsers.

~~~
brwr
Based on the general consensus that the DOM sucks, do you think there will be
any movement to make change to/replace it in the future? If not, why?

~~~
dominic_cocch
I sincerely doubt it, since it would require a massive overhaul of everything
from browsers to JS itself most likely.

The trend has been to use less HTML and more CSS to style it. HTML5 is also an
attempt to extend the DOM's capabilities and also make it more semantic.

