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Javascript Technology Update [long]
May. 1st, 2012 12:01 pm[I just sent a version of this around to my group at work, and figured that it may be generally interesting to folks here. This is an extensive braindump of a lot of related stuff I’ve been reading into in the past month as it comes across my RSS feeds. There are many links below, and they’re worth reading if you are interested in where the Web is going, but it’ll take some time to read through all of them. It basically expands on my post from yesterday about ClojureScript.]
In my work, ever since the year I spent on CommYou, I've been tending to favor Flash and Actionscript for serious UI development. That has nothing to do with HTML (HTML5 is pretty sweet) – it’s because Javascript is pretty much a disaster for trying to build sophisticated UIs. It works okay for simple projects, but as a tool evolves it turns into a gigantic maintenance headache.
This isn’t exactly a minority view: especially over the past year, there’s been a growing sense (I don’t know if I’d quite call it a “consensus” yet, but it’s getting there) that Javascript is the main impediment to Web development. Libraries like jQuery help, but can only do so much to paper over the weaknesses of a language that hasn’t meaningfully evolved in over a decade. So the open-source community, characteristically, has started to treat this as a bug and work around it.
This is mostly manifesting in the form of Javascript compilers: that is, new languages and tools that target Javascript as the *output*. Especially since Google turned Javascript execution speed into the front line of the browser wars, execution speed has improved dramatically – by orders of magnitude relative to IE6. The result is that pretty much all modern browsers (even recent versions of IE) execute Javascript blazingly fast. That allows people to start treating it as, essentially, machine language, and simply compile better languages to it.
( Cut so that the non-programmers can ignore the rest of this )
In my work, ever since the year I spent on CommYou, I've been tending to favor Flash and Actionscript for serious UI development. That has nothing to do with HTML (HTML5 is pretty sweet) – it’s because Javascript is pretty much a disaster for trying to build sophisticated UIs. It works okay for simple projects, but as a tool evolves it turns into a gigantic maintenance headache.
This isn’t exactly a minority view: especially over the past year, there’s been a growing sense (I don’t know if I’d quite call it a “consensus” yet, but it’s getting there) that Javascript is the main impediment to Web development. Libraries like jQuery help, but can only do so much to paper over the weaknesses of a language that hasn’t meaningfully evolved in over a decade. So the open-source community, characteristically, has started to treat this as a bug and work around it.
This is mostly manifesting in the form of Javascript compilers: that is, new languages and tools that target Javascript as the *output*. Especially since Google turned Javascript execution speed into the front line of the browser wars, execution speed has improved dramatically – by orders of magnitude relative to IE6. The result is that pretty much all modern browsers (even recent versions of IE) execute Javascript blazingly fast. That allows people to start treating it as, essentially, machine language, and simply compile better languages to it.
( Cut so that the non-programmers can ignore the rest of this )
