Navigating the JavaScript landscape

- [Narrator] Alright, so now you have a clear picture of what JavaScript is, but what are all these other things people are talking about? There's ECMAScript 2015 and ES6 and TypeScript and CoffeeScript and on top of that we have libraries like jQuery and frameworks like AngularJS and React and server site tools like Node.js. Some clarity would be useful, I think. Alright, first things first. JavaScript conforms to the ECMAScript standard, a specification for interpreting code and languages like JavaScript.

ECMAScript itself is not a language but an evolving standard. There of all the weird numbers and names. ECMAScript 2015 is the new name for ECMAScript 6 or ES6. Browsers use the ECMAScript specification to interpret JavaScript. From the coder's perspective JavaScript and ECMAScript are two sides of the same coin. If all these names confuse you, just ignore them and focus on JavaScript. The reason why you see people say they write ECMAScript in place of JavaScript is because as the ECMAScript standard evolves it often takes time for the browsers to catch up.

Right now ECMAScript 5.1 from 2011 is still the standard, but it's severely outdated. ECMAScript 2015, formerly ES6, is emerging as the new standard and will use some of it's features in this course. But, not all browsers support all these new features yet, so to make scripts cross-browser compatible developers have to run modern JavaScript so ECMAScript's 2015 through a transpiler like Babel that translates it into old JavaScript.

Meanwhile, ECMAScript 2016 or ES7 is in development so by the time ES 2015 is fully implemented, people will be using Babel or a similar tool to write ES 2016 which really in the end is just more JavaScript. Just FYI, we're not going to cover Babel in this course. That rabbit hole is too deep for right now and Eve Porcello has a course dedicated to this topic called Up and Running with ECMAScript 6. Go check it out after you finish this course.

Okay, what about all this other stuff? Well, jQuery is a library for JavaScript functions and commands that allows us to do fancy JavaScript things with less code. Think of it as a literal library of small programs we can take out and use any time. There used to be a ton of these libraries available, but today jQuery pretty much reigns supreme. JavaScript frameworks like AngularJS, React, and Vue.js are all the rage right now. These are open-source front-end application frameworks that allow developers to build in-browser applications that generate websites for us.

Facebook, for example, runs on React. So whereas traditional technologies like php generate the pages on the server and send them to the browser, these frameworks run in the browser and pull just the data from the server. This makes the websites that run them really fast, but it has some significant drawbacks when JavaScript is not working. These frameworks are super cool, super powerful, and we are not covering them in this course. You can go check out the dedicated courses on these platforms when you're done here.

Finally, we have JavaScript platforms and runtime environments like Node.js. These tools allow us to use JavaScript as a server site programming language which kind of goes against the idea that JavaScript is something that runs in the browser. I mentioned rabbit holes earlier, this is another one we're going to stay well clear of in this course other than to use Node as a tool on our computer to help debug some JavaScript code.