Evolution and Growth of JavaScript

JavaScript is everywhere these days. JavaScript powers mobile, desktop, and even hybrid apps are now ruling the software world. This has led it to become one of the most required software development skills of 2021. JavaScript is popular, that’s a fact. It is the number one popular technology according to Stack Over Flow's survey. JavaScript works on the client-side and for the front end of the web. Browsers provide inbuilt support for JavaScript. 95% of web development is being developed on JS. DOM manipulation, Online games, form validations are some examples.

Reasons for the popularity of JavaScript

A big community strengthening it: There are numerous jokes around the fact that there are probably more JavaScript frameworks out there than actually developers using them. Even though JavaScript has completed its 25 years in the tech world, It is the most desirable and popular language in the world. JavaScript has 1,444,231 libraries and the number is increasing continuously. The community is expanding every day with something new in hand.

A decent way of evolving: Leaving frameworks and libraries aside, the language itself is constantly evolving. This evolution has not been controlled by a single entity. Although JavaScript itself is owned by Oracle, the language is meant to follow the specifications of ECMAScript. And these specifications are in fact, controlled indirectly by the community itself, and regulated and organized by the TC 39 committee. They review all the different proposals to evolve the language and work with them until they’re mature enough.

Evolution of JavaScript: The language has been evolving at a continuous pace over the past few years. If you are new to JavaScript maybe you’ve not noticed it, but there was a huge jump from ECMAScript 5 to version 6 (ES 6), and in the future JS will open new ways to interact with the evolving tech scenarios.

ECMAScript 6: It brought numerous new features in the code style of JavaScript. It introduced us to great features such as Arrow function, Template strings, Array destructuring, scope operator, Let keyword, and many more features.

Features of JavaScript

Delicate Scripting language: It can handle data in an efficient way. As originally it was only designed for client-side scripting.

Dynamic Typing: The type of the variable is defined in accordance with the stored value. It means if you have declared x, Then it can store either number or string or any other type.

Function usage: In JavaScript functions can be passed to other functions as arguments and also a function can return a new function.

Platform unbiased: If you have written your JavaScript code, You can run it on any browser regardless of the platform you are using.

Asynchronous programming: It supports asynchronous AJAX requests, promises to fetch data from the server. Requests run parallel to each other, reducing processing time.

Client-side validation: Form validations are an important part of JavaScript, enabling users to enter correct data.

Provides more control on the browser: JavaScript helps the developers to reduce the load on the server by implementing validations, storing cookies in the browser itself.

JavaScript and Artificial intelligence

In the present era, Python has become the most approved way of working with artificial intelligence and machine learning, due to its rich libraries such as pandas, Numpy, and many more. But JavaScript also provides an alternative for the machine learning model deployment. It has some libraries Such as,

1. Tensorflow.js
2. Brain.js
3. ML5.js

Which are being used to train and develop ML models on JS platforms.

JavaScript provides an easy integration of machine learning in web and mobile applications. Python support for mobile and web applications is at present in its preliminary stages. But on the other hand, JavaScript has rich support for cross-platform development tools such as React Native and Ionic. JS browser objects support Js machine learning libraries. JS machine learning is very versatile, If you have deployed a machine learning application on the browser then, It is easy to implement over mobile applications with little changes.

Machine Learning with JavaScript can provide end-users the ability to create fast and customized models to train data sets. Users can use and interact with models even when the internet is not available. It can create a base model on the server and make a copy of that model, which could be used on the user’s device. It will allow users to work with the models in an efficient way when they are disconnected from the server.

JavaScript Frameworks to consider

There are a number of JavaScript frameworks available to work with users’ interests. Such as, React Native, AngularJS, Vue.js.

One of the widely used frameworks of JavaScript is Node.js. It is an open-source technology that combines the power of Chrome’s V8 JavaScript engine with low-level system functions like network and file operations. Using Node.js, developers can build JavaScript applications outside of the web browser. There are a number of successful examples of the applications, which have a known dominance over the internet and techno world. To list some of the apps, such as,

1. Netflix-Netflix initially used Node.js to enable high-volume web streaming to over one hundred eighty million subscribers. Netflix focused on three goals to provide observability, debuggability, and availability. The optimum result extracted was the Node Quark infrastructure. An application gateway authenticates and routes requests to the Node Quark service, which then communicates with APIs and formats responses that are sent back to the client. This allows the Netflix app to run seamlessly on different devices.
2. Coursera
3. Slack
4. Figma
5. Uber and many more.

Node.js made its way into space as the technology for displaying data on screens in Space X's Dragon spacecraft.

Because of the node.js, JavaScript nowadays is not only a browser-side language, It turned out to be a server-side language as well. Which extensively promoted JavaScript's image in the fast-growing galaxy of numerous programming languages and their frameworks. It raised the database interactivity in JavaScript. For instance, user authentication via database became possible in JavaScript with node.js alone.

Node.js powered API's are well used for communication between the web applications running on Browsers and the web apps on mobile devices.

JavaScript and cloud

The evolution of Node.js as a server-side JavaScript programming language opened up the ability to use JavaScript in the cloud. Today, most of the major cloud providers support JavaScript in the cloud. All major cloud services providers have a suite of SDKs and client libraries in JavaScript to integrate with their services from your JavaScript application. The major purpose of the said libraries is to,

Recognize and transcribe human speech with speech to text

Add a rich Cognitive Search to your web app

Conclusion

JavaScript has a long way to go in this fast-running competitive world of technology. JavaScript frameworks have the tendency to compete with any other framework. It is a language that any person can learn. It is fun to interact with web elements and explore them with the use of JS. There is a saying, ‘Any app that can be written in JavaScript, will eventually be written in JavaScript’. As JavaScript is now transforming its way towards modern technologies such as Artificial Intelligence and Cloud Computing, In the upcoming future, It would definitely make its presence known among other programming languages and frameworks.