JavaScript, the 90’s baby

In the mid-1990s, the early Internet consisted exclusively of static HTML web pages. Web developers of the time decided they would like to have interactivity in their web sites to enable dynamic behavior after the page has loaded. JavaScript emerged as an early solution, alongside the Java programming language, for adding dynamic behaviors to web pages. After intense competition in the web browser market, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer achieved overwhelmingly dominant market share. Unfortunately, without competition driving innovation, client-side scripting did not receive any more significant development for several years.

AJAX saves JavaScript

AJAX, short for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML, restarted strong interest in the development of client-side technology for web pages. AJAX is a set of strategies for creating web applications that can load data in the background without requiring a full reload. If you have ever seen an email come into your inbox in your web browser without the page reloading, that happens because of AJAX!

AJAX gave new use to JavaScript and kicked off a flurry of development within JavaScript and using JavaScript. In addition, new web browser competitors like Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome revived innovation in web browsers for client side scripting.

Enter Node.js

While AJAX brought new life to client-side scripting with JavaScript, Node.js opened up an entire new world of programming for JavaScript developers. Node.js was the first server-side runtime for JavaScript. Before Node.js, JavaScript could only run in your web browser. With Node.js you can run JavaScript code on your server instead of having to use a traditional server-side language like PHP, Python, Perl, Ruby, or Java. This meant JavaScript developers could build new types of applications to support and enhance their JavaScript web applications without having to learn another programming language.

Becoming a mature, general-purpose programming language

In the beginning JavaScript could only do things within your web browser. Node.js opened up several new use cases for JavaScript, and the advantage of having to learn a single language to do any type of programming helped grow the JavaScript community considerably. JavaScript developers have used Node.js to create tools for programming complex web apps purely in JavaScript, for writing native mobile applications, for creating native desktop applications, for serverless computing, and for machine learning and artificial intelligence.

The huge growth in use and investment in JavaScript helped drive the development of formal specifications and bodies for managing the ongoing development of the core JavaScript language and the development of solutions in different areas of use. This kind of work helps ensure there is a single, standardized implementation of JavaScript for developers to target and helps foster communities of practice to continue using and growing the JavaScript ecosystem.

What’s next for JavaScript?

JavaScript can only get better as new advancements and features are added to the core language specification and new tools are developed using JavaScript. Some of the biggest areas of excitement and interest in the future of JavaScript are Deno - a new implementation of server-side JavaScript; WebAssembly - a new technology for deploying compiled code in the web browser; and web application framworks and libraries.

Deno

While Node.js undoubtedly revolutioned JavaScript, the creator of Node.js had a wishlist of ways Node.js could be improved if he had a chance to do Node.js over again. Deno is his do-over of Node.js. Written in Rust (a relatively new and exciting systems programming language), Deno promises a much more secure, much more high performance run-time for JavaScript than Node.js. Deno has already hit 1.0 and continues to receive strong development and support.

WebAssembly

WebAssembly is a relatively new web technology standard for web browsers to enable developers to use compiled code inside of their web applications. One of the biggest uses of WebAssembly is providing a way for developers to use code other than JavaScript inside of web browsers. Many traditionally server-side languages (like Rust, Python, PHP, C++, etc.) can compile their code to WebAssembly binaries, and web applications can pull these binaries into the web browser for users to use. Besides using different languages in the browser, WebAssembly binaries can have much faster performance than JavaScript code inside of the web browser.

Web application frameworks and libraries

One of the most popular use cases for Node.js and JavaScript is creating tools that let you generate dynamic web applications or web sites. These tools include but are not limited to Angular, React, Svelte, Vue, Astro, Eleventy, Elder.js, Gatsby.js, Next.js, and Nuxt.js. All of these tools try to streamline the process of creating rich web pages and web applications.

New frameworks and libraries in this area are coming out all the time, and new approaches to creating web applications and web sites from JavaScript are emerging from the lessons learned from previous frameworks. Developers are finding new ways to decrease the size of JavaScript code inside of web pages, speed up page loading performance, and increase the accessibility of web sites built from JavaScript.