I have been noticing a lot of attention being paid to JavaScript lately. Technologies like Node, Angular, Backbone, MongoDB, etc. seem to be all the rage lately. Additionally, various workflow tools like Bower and Grunt are popping up and in documentation I read, they seem to assume that the user is already familiar with them as though they were industry standard.
From some of the media I follow, I get the feeling that this is more than just a new fashion, but rather something driven by the needs of big data.
Is that what’s behind this?
When did this trend start? I feel like I am behind the curve.
Javascipt is to computer languages what English is to human languages – clunky and weird without much to redeem it as a language, but also, due to circumstances of history, quite widely understood at least in the basics.
The fact that it runs in web browsers means that nearly every computer in the world can run a javascript program, which you can’t say for most programming languages. And the fact that web apps depend on them means that Google and Mozilla et al have worked really hard on making good javascript engines in the last few years.
JSON, which is taken from Javascript’s object literal notation, has also really taken off lately as a “less chatty” version of XML for specifying semi-structured data. That’s probably the main connection to “Big Data”, where there are big bodies of semi-structured data, and it is a natural fit.
Well, I know that NodeJS can be used to solve massive concurrency. That’s not an issue where I work but it’s a problem that companies like FB and Twitter need to solve. Additionally, I know that there is a push to serve web, Android and iOS from a unified API and it seems like most people (well, me anyway) prefer JSON to XML.
I know node uses asynchronous request handling (which can be construed as what “solve massive concurrency” means – be able to handle a lot of web requests at the same time). But it is not unique in that regard, and that property isn’t tied to it’s using javascript at all.
I think the main deal with Node.js is that you get a lot of web devs moving up to doing server-side code, and staying with the language they already know.
Add me to the list of “most people”, if for no other reason than typing angle brackets is hard.