JavaScript Annotated – January 2016
Keeping up with everything that’s going on in the web development community and the JavaScript ecosystem can be challenging. With lots of articles and blog posts that we on the WebStorm team go through on a regular basis, we thought we’d share some that we enjoyed and discussed the most over the past month.
We’re not going for the most comprehensive digest out there, but want to focus mainly on covering the technologies already supported in WebStorm as well as the industry’s best practices.
JavaScript, libraries and frameworks
Dr. Axel Rauschmayer, who’s well known for his blog 2ality and multiple books about JavaScript, has started a new weekly email newsletter, ES.next News.
Jake Archibald in his blog talks about web streams and how they will help us take even more control over network processes and improve the performance of web pages.
On January 14 jQuery celebrated its 10th birthday and is still one of the the most popular frameworks for web development. John Resig, the author of jQuery, shares his memories and jQuery milestones. On the same day jQuery 3.0 reaches beta… and it no longer supports IE6-8.
If you’ve missed this news, as of January 12, 2016, Microsoft has ended support for older versions of Internet Explorer (versions 6-8).
Péter Márton shares his perspective on the best practices for developing React apps in 2016. We think the only thing missing is WebStorm :) Don’t forget to check out the WebStorm tips on coding assistance, linting and refactoring for React developers.
One of January’s most discussed articles was Cory House’s critical comparison of Angular 2 and React. By the way, support for both frameworks saw some noticeable improvements in WebStorm 12 EAP. Unfortunately or luckily for us all, there’s no silver bullet. JavaScript fatigue and the state of modern web development also were hot topics this January.
Node.js
In January Microsoft open sourced ChakraCore, part of their JavaScript engine, and sent a pull request to enable Node.js to work with ChakraCore. The Microsoft team shows some performance improvements when using Node.js with ChakraCore for some real-life tasks, as compared to the current Node.js version with V8.
While that pull request is still going through the code review, the Node.js community is discussing plans for moving toward VM neutrality.
Sacha Greif, a co-author of Discover Meteor, talks about the current state of the Meteor platform and what went wrong, and shares his hopes for Meteor becoming a back-end platform for building React apps in the future.
Tools
The Battle of Task Runners is far from over. Cory House shares his experience of moving from Gulp and Grunt to writing npm scripts (good that WebStorm supports them all, right?!). He believes that Gulp and Grunt introduce redundant abstractions that make debugging really complicated and the whole build process too unstable and too dependent on dozens of plugins.
And a bit more on npm:
- a great collection of tips and articles on npm;
- surprising discovery that disabling npm install progress bar leads to a significant improvement in performance (the fix is on the way).
We hope you’ve enjoyed this overview of January’s trending web topics. We’ll be super happy to hear your feedback on this blog post! Did you like it? Should we continue this type of posts? Let us know!
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