Why JavaScript is the Future Programming Language | How to Learn JavaScript

Remember the first time we wrote “Hello World” in all programming languages and used “alert();” in html web page, and reached yeah as my code is working perfectly. Well, the 90s kid will remember this. About 95% of all popular and eye-caching websites use JavaScript. JS was released in 1995, and after 25 years now, JavaScript has become the most popular and standard programming language for web design because of its performance and its tight integration with DOM. Personally, I feel JS has the potential like Machine Learning has.

The JavaScript programming language was created by Brendan Eich (He was working for Netscape) in 1995 that allows web developers in making web pages more interactive and dynamic. JavaScript is the core technology of World Wide Web as HTML and CSS, which derives ECMAScript specifications. JS is a client side scripting language which enables interactive web pages design. JS provides the application programming interface for working with regular expressions, data structure, dates, text, and DOM (Document Object Model). JS engines were originally used in web browsers, but now embedded in server-side website deployments.

Why JS is the most popular language

V8 Engine: The beast powering JavaScript

A JavaScript engine is a well-defined program or an interpreter which executes the JavaScript code. V8 is an open source JavaScript engine, developed by Google and written in C++. V8 engine is used to power Google Chrome, also used in Node.js runtime. It was first mainly designed to increase the performance of JavaScript execution inside the web browsers. It compiles the JavaScript code in machine code using a JIT (Just-In-Time) complier. V8 engine gets the speed from JIT compilation of JS code to native machine code. First, code is compiled by a baseline complier which generates machine code. JIT compilation generate the result as machine code which can take a large amount of memory. Now here Ignition takes the place to optimize JS code. Some of the tasks V8 handles are:

1. Garbage Collection

2. Compilation to Machine code

3. Inline caching

4. Pointer compression

5. and much more optimization

Mature Ecosystem

The JavaScript community is vast which has one of the most mature ecosystem. Simply you open the browser, go to developer mode and open console, and write the code, JavaScript engine is waiting there is execute the code. JavaScript ecosystem is a collection of libraries, packages, and other resources for the every stage of application building and deployment.

Full-stack Development: It is a framework similar concept of development which allow developers to build the complete product including UI design, front-end and back-end, and database management.

MEAN stack: It is another free and open source toolset for building dynamic web applications and interactive websites. It includes MongoDB (NoSQL Database), Express (Web Application Framework), Angular (Front-end framework), and Node (Server platform, back-end development).

JavaScript is FAST and SCALABLE

Everyone start programming from C/C++ high-level programming languages when entering computer professional courses. No one really beat them but JavaScript is fast and become first choice of developers now days for building single page application. JavaScript is highly scalable, running on a single threaded architecture, and leads to asynchronous event driven programming model. V8 engine makes it fast, powered by Google. Node.js and ES6 comes with a lots of performance optimizing features that makes it faster programming experience. Jeff Miccolis has mentioned that Node can send 600 emails in just 3 seconds where PHP takes 30 seconds for it because it is Asynchronous and highly scalable.

JSON (JavaScript Object Notation)

JSON is a language independent that derived from a subset of JavaScript, stands for JavaScript Object Notation. JSON data can be written in any programming language, format as text only. In JavaScript, JSON format is quite identical for creating objects. So, a JavaScript program can easily convert JSON data into native JavaScript objects. A common use of JSON is, read data from web server and display that data in a web page. JSON is a syntax of serializing objects, arrays, numbers, string, and NULL.

ES6 (ECMAScript 6)

JavaScript was created in May 1995, originally named Mocha became LiveScript later. At that time, Sun Microsystem (Now Oracle) owned the trademark for JavaScript, so Netscape acquired the trademark and licence for JavaScript in December 1995. Later in 1996, Netscape took this to ECMA International, which developed new standards for JS and renamed it as ECMAScript (ECMA-262). It was differ from JavaScript with more powerful functions and standard libraries. In December 1999, they introduced a more powerful and updated version of ECMAScript which is supported by most of browsers, name as ECAMScript-3. It changed the use of regular expressions, string handling, control statements, exception handling, and error handling. ECMAScript 4 (July 2008) was the new version, but TC39 was not agree with features of it. So, in December 2009 ECMAScript 5 was developed with several enhancements to the standard libraries.

ECMAScript 6 was released in 2015 with lots of new features and enhancements to the JavaScript. ES6 includes new promising features as arrow functions, template string, classes, enhanced object literals, const, let, iterators, collections, array and object extensions, and many more. It is also knows as “ES6 Harmony”. Later new versions was released ECMAScript 7 (2016), ECMAScript 8 (2017), and ECMAScript 9 (2018). Most popular version of ECMAScript is ES6 which explore the similar knowledge as well later versions.

Single Page Application

A Single Page Application (SPA) is a simple website or web application that rewrites the web page with new data when a user interacts. It works inside a browser and you do not need to reload the page. JavaScript enables the ability to manipulate the DOM elements and load new contents on web page. We can build fast and secure single page applications using advance JavaScript frameworks and libraries like Angular, Ember.js, Meteror.js, React JS, and Vue.js. In SPA, the resources are only loaded once throughout lifespan of web application. Development is very simplified process, and it is easy to debug with browser (Google Chrome). It allows to write reusable code, so you do not require to write the same code again to render the pages. It makes very easier to develop mobile applications.

But there is a problem with SPA, it is very tricky and not an easy task to make SEO optimizations for web page because contents are loading without refreshing the page. SPA is less secure because of XSS (Cross-Site Scripting), attackers can easily inject client-side code into web application. So, you can build Multi-page Application using advance JavaScript framework. It is a perfect approach for clean multi-level navigation and SEO optimization.

Advance JavaScript: Frameworks & Web Components

React JS

ReactJS is a declarative, flexible component based JavaScript library for building user interfaces for web and mobile, which is maintained by Facebook and a community of independent developers. React is most popular among developers for building and maintaining user interfaces. React can be used to design simple views for each state in application, with more predictable code. React code is made of encapsulated components, written in JavaScript which allows to pass rich data through the app and maintain their own state (even out of DOM). React can also render on the web server using Node and power mobile applications using React Native.

Vue JS: Expected to rise more

Vue.js is an open source (MVVM: Model-view-view-model structure) JavaScript progressive framework for building user interfaces and single page applications (SPA), it was created by Evan (former Google Employee). Evan observed few things in Angular, could be improved and applied to Vue. It uses extended components of HTML and JavaScript. Vue.js supports declarative rendering, asynchronous DOM updates, two-way data binding, strict adherence to web component specifications, and simple integration with HTML templates.

Angular

Angular is a TypeScript-based open-source web application framework led by the Angular Team at Google and by a community of individuals and corporations. Angular is a complete rewrite from the same team that built AngularJS. Angular is a platform for building mobile and desktop web applications. Angular is an app-design framework and development platform for creating efficient and sophisticated single-page apps. It is widely used by Youtube, Google Maps, Paypal etc. Angular is also easy to learn for those beginners who are coming from OOPs background. Using the right element packages, you can build Angular components and publish them as web components. Angular grew to become a great framework to building complex system but it is less useful for building fast changing user interface.

Polymer

Polymer is an open-source JavaScript library for building web applications using Web Components. The library is being developed by Google developers and contributors on GitHub. Modern design principles are implemented as a separate project using Google's Material design principles. Polymer is a standard JS library, developed by Google and used by Google earth and Youtue. It enables the web components to build an interactive web applications and ability to compose HTML, CSS and JS leveraging the browser native libraries.

Node.js

Node.js is an open-source, cross-platform, JavaScript runtime environment for developing server-side web applications that executes JavaScript code outside of a web browser. Node.js is a JavaScript runtime built on Chrome's V8 JavaScript engine for building fast and scalable network applications. Node. js uses an event-driven, non-blocking I/O model that makes it lightweight and efficient, perfect for data-intensive real-time applications that run across distributed devices. Now with Node.js, you can build back-end for website, chatting application, web API, shopping cart, gaming engine, and social media applications. Node is used by popular companies like PayPal, LinkedIn, Yahoo, Mozilla, Netflix, GoDaddy, and eBay.

Typescript

TypeScript is an open-source programming language developed and maintained by Microsoft. It is a strict syntactical superset of JavaScript and adds optional static typing to the language. TypeScript is designed for development of large applications and trans compiles to JavaScript. It offers classes, modules, and interfaces to help you build robust components. TypeScript speeds up your development experience by catching errors and providing fixes before you even run your code. TypeScript is an open-source language which builds on JavaScript, one of the world’s most used tools, by adding static type definitions. Types provide a way to describe the shape of an object, providing better documentation, and allowing TypeScript to validate that your code is working correctly. TypeScript code is transformed into JavaScript code via the TypeScript compiler or Babel.

How to Learn JavaScript? The Future of Web Development

If you enter as a beginner, there is a little chance you make simple mistakes and possibly encounter some JavaScript issues. JavaScript is easy to learn and understand programming language. To learn JS, start from scratch and learn basic concepts of OOPs (Object Oriented Programming), syntax, and fundamentals. If someone has basic understanding of C++ or Java programming, he/she will make less mistakes than a beginner.

Learn JS from Online Tutorial

For a good start, you can learn JavaScript fundamentals online from W3School, Tutorials Point, Udemy, Coursera, or other resources. You’ll find the plenty of free courses, certification programs, and online tutorials for it. They have well organized and easy to understand tutorials with lots of examples and exercise to use HTML, CSS, BootStrap, and JavaScript. All the courses are designed to teach beginners all the concepts for front-end and back-end using JS.

Youtube: eLearning | Video Tutorials

Youtube is a large collection of videos, leading platform for entertainment and learning. You can find many popular channels, communities for tutorials for learning JavaScript. JS is one of the most powerful, easy to learn programming language that offers many web development opportunities.

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