UPDATED 01:04 EDT / OCTOBER 18 2016

NEWS

The JS Foundation launches to unite the JavaScript community

The Linux Foundation has announced the birth of the JS Foundation, which aims to provide technical governance and mentoring to a range of JavaScript-focused open-source development projects.

JavaScript is one of the most popular high-level programming languages, and underwrites millions of web applications in use today. The language itself has long been standardized via the ECMAScript language specification. But that’s not the case for the mishmash of programs that use JavaScript, and that’s what the JS Foundation is hoping to do.

The problem, according to the JS Foundation, is that JavaScript developers employ a vast, disorganized portfolio of open-source technologies that they use to build, test and deploy applications. To try to bring some order to that chaotic world, the JS Foundation will try to encourage greater adoption of what it considers to be the most useful JavaScript solutions.

“The JS Foundation aims to support a vast array of technologies that complement projects throughout the entire JavaScript ecosystem,” said Kris Borchers, executive director, JS Foundation, in a statement. “JavaScript is a pervasive technology, blurring the boundaries between server, client, cloud and IoT. We welcome any projects, organizations or developers looking to help bolster the JavaScript community and inspire the next wave of growth for application development.”

According to Borchers, the official stated goals of the new foundation are as follows:

  • Drive widespread adoption and continued development of key JavaScript solutions and related technologies;
  • Facilitate collaboration within the JavaScript development community;
  • Create a center of gravity for open-source projects throughout the end-to-end JavaScript ecosystem guiding them toward open governance and diverse collaborator bases;
  • Host the infrastructure to support JS Foundation projects;
  • Enable, through advancement of the JS Foundation’s projects and strategic partnerships, an open and accessible web.

While the JS Foundation will live under the roof of the Linux Foundation, it also has backing from big companies like IBM, Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd., and Sauce Labs Inc. In addition, the new project also has the backing of the Node.js Foundation, another big player in the JavaScript community with closely aligned goals, Borchers said. One reason for this is that the JS Foundation will be able to fulfill a critical goal that the Node.js Foundation hasn’t taken on – supporting third-party packages, said Mikeal Rogers, community manager of the Node.js Foundation.

“We are focused on Node core, but many of our users depend on a lot of third-party packages, and when those packages become big enough, it would be really nice if they had a foundation to go into, something to protect the IP and do all the things that we do for core that make it remain stable,” Rogers said. “Now that JS foundation can really provide that for our users, we don’t have to become a large umbrella organization.”

The initial JS Foundation projects include:

Appium, contributed by Sauce Labs, is an open source Node.js server used for automating native, mobile web, and hybrid applications on iOS and Android platforms as well as the recent addition of the Universal Windows Platform. Appium expands JS Foundation’s current test framework and tooling offerings into the device automation space.

Interledger.js, contributed by Ripple, enables instant payments and micropayments in any currency, across many payment networks using the Interledger Protocol. By supporting this project, the JS Foundation is encouraging organizations and their application developers to consider new ways to think about payments on the web and look for ways to simplify and standardize those processes.

JerryScript, contributed by Samsung, is a lightweight, fully-featured JavaScript engine for Internet of Things devices that ships in commercial products today. As IoT is one of the largest and fastest growing sectors of the JavaScript ecosystem, JerryScript is just the beginning of JS Foundation’s efforts to support projects and developers within the IoT ecosystem.

Mocha is a feature-rich JavaScript testing framework providing a command-line interface for Node.js as well as in-browser testing capabilities. Focused on supporting the entire JavaScript ecosystem, the JS Foundation brings Mocha under its mentorship alongside Lodash to ensure that many JavaScript application cornerstones will be available and supported long into the future.

Moment.js is a lightweight JavaScript date library for parsing, validating, manipulating, and formatting dates and also provides time zone support to JavaScript through Moment Timezone. Another cornerstone of the JavaScript ecosystem, Moment.js helps empower developers to build amazing JavaScript applications. By supporting Moment.js alongside projects like Globalize and Jed, the JS Foundation hopes to foster collaboration for internationalization and formatting.

Node-RED, contributed by IBM, is a flow-based programming environment built on Node.js – commonly used in the IoT space – and aimed at creating event-driven applications that can easily integrate APIs and services. Node-RED will be a major factor in the JS Foundation’s efforts to support the full end-to-end JavaScript ecosystem.

webpack is a bundler for modules and is primarily used to bundle JavaScript files for usage in a browser. It is also capable of transforming, bundling, or packaging just about any resource or asset.


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