Deploy Friday: Your source for everything Open Source

#25: Language Spotlight — JavaScript

June 01, 2021 Larry Garfield, Platform.sh, Thomas Lattimore, Platform.sh, Jessica Keener, Senior Software Engineer, Austin Keener, Software Engineer Season 1 Episode 25
Deploy Friday: Your source for everything Open Source
#25: Language Spotlight — JavaScript
Show Notes

In our new mini-series, Language Spotlight, we’ll take a tour of every language that Platform.sh supports. Today our focus is on JavaScript, as we delve into what’s new and exciting in the space, asynchronous coding, and the advantages of Node.js with two JavaScript experts and Software Engineers, Jessica and Austin Keener.

Understanding asynchronous JavaScript

JavaScript can be different from other asynchronous languages. As Austin Keener explains, “In JavaScript, you say, ‘Hey, make this request.’ Whenever you're creating these contexts that need to be actually executed, they're all going into this queue that gets picked up and gets run back on that thread. So while it is single threaded, you still get all of the asynchronous aspects of it, because each piece is broken up, instead of being this one long, continuous thread of execution that needs to happen. And that can cause some question marks to pop up for people, because it's different than the majority of other language asynchronous models.”

Exciting JavaScript developments 

Our other expert guest, Jessica, names the three things that excite her most about the JavaScript space right now. She includes:

  • Adding query selectors and query select all
  • Improved looping and selecting inside of arrays
  • Native support for Ajax

She adds, “As JavaScript is moving further and further into platform jQuery, pushing yourself to learn more than just jQuery and starting to understand some of the underlying native stuff that is supported now is going to be a great advantage.”

Node.js promotes consistency

Austin Keener shares what he thinks is the biggest advantage of using server-side language Node.js. “Developers are going to be able to understand, read, debug, and contribute to every single one of our repositories no matter where it is in the stack.” He adds that the large amount of available libraries helps, too, “It allows you to have consistency in your language or in your repositories, among your developers, and a shared understanding that you can speak to.”

If you learned something new about JavaScript today, and you’re excited to get started, try Node.js on Platform.sh.

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