This is the third day of my participation in Gwen Challenge.

ES5, ES6, ES7, ES8, ES9. In my opinion, the history of JS is divided into two parts. The first part of history, JavaScript, only exists in browsers. These days, there is competition between Netscape and IE, and there is no standard. Each browser enforces its methods. After a while, technology and application development moved to the Internet. The high communication capability of the Internet will change the needs of users. Desktop applications want to go to the Web, and companies are starting to develop different browser plug-ins for application hosting, such as Adobe Flash, Microsoft Silverlight, and JavaFX.

The second part starts with NodeJS. NodeJS allows JavaScript to exist outside of the browser rendering engine. This ability makes JavaScript more powerful than ever before. The community has expanded the use of JavaScript for different purposes (Web servers, machine learning, robot programming, API development). With hosting, JavaScript runs on every platform (server, desktop, machine, browser, etc.). After all, JavaScript needs a strong standardization. Then start EcmaScript ES5, ES6, ES7, ES8, ES9…

Browser era

Brenden Eich: He’s the creator of JavaScript. He first developed the language in Netscape in 1995, which you now know as Mozilla. JavaScript was first named Mocha, then promptly changed to Mocha → LiveScript → JavaScript. Doug Crockford: He developed JSON (Javascript Object Notation) in 2002. It’s popular because JavaScript natively supports this format, and it’s useful for clients and servers to communicate AJAX. Transferring over the network is simpler than defining XML and lightweight. Jesse James Garrett: He first wrote AJAX in his 2005 article. The AJAX specification defines asynchronous communication between the web page and the server without refreshing the entire page. John Resig: He developed the JQuery library in 2006. There are a lot of inconsistencies in Web apis these days, and there is no standard browser. There are many problems with developing Web pages in JS, Netscape vs. IE. The JQuery library provides developers with an abstraction of these issues and hides the Web API details. There are other libraries (Prototype, Dojo, Mootools), but others will not continue to exist after JQuery becomes popular. HTML5: Flash technology was very popular in the past. It died when Steve Jobs announced that he would not support flash memory on the iPad and iPhone. The only web technology we support is HTML5. Google is just like Apple and Microsoft. So the future Web technology standards will be HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript. All plug-in frameworks in browsers are dead for Flash (Applet ve JavaFX, Microsoft Silverlight, etc.)

NodeJS period

Ryan Dahl developed NodeJS in 2009. He experimented with using the V8 engine in Chrome for a different purpose. Ryan forked the V8 engine and used it to work alone without a browser. He thinks V8 Engine is designed and optimized to respond asynchronously to user interactions in the UI, and perhaps JavaScript could be used in Web servers to respond to client requests. It’s really a brilliant idea. The community seized on this idea because it provided full stack capability development. Frontend and Backend use the same language stack and some engine advantages to respond to heavy traffic through a single step mechanism. NodeJS opens a new era of JavaScript. It finally broke free from the shackles of the browser. Then the JS community and companies try to use the platform for different purposes in different areas. For example, in the past we only developed Web pages, but now we can use JavaScript to develop enterprise single-page Web applications, back-end applications, artificial intelligence applications, and so on. The development and scale of these new applications creates new requirements that trigger standardization and language updates. Then EcmaScript will catch on. EcmaScript (ES) : It is the standard that forms the basis of Javascript. Since it first emerged as a language to run on browsers, other languages have included Flash’s ActionScript and Microsoft’s standard JScript in its first version of JavaScript. But then the nice features of other languages were added to Javascript and disappeared. TC39: The committee responsible for ES development includes many browser developers and major Web-related companies. Version: The TC39 team released a new version of ES in June, with the EcmaScript version number increasing year by year. For example, a language feature released in 2015 is called ES6, and a language feature released in 2016 is called ES7. In other words, the language feature released this year in 2021 is called ES12.