Happy 25th birthday JavaScript
Let’s look back at the journey of JS!
JavaScript is at the center stage of Web Development now. It’s been 25 years since it emerged as a web development player. Let’s look at where it all started and how it would take shape in the future.
1996
JavaScript the Definitive guide - Published. JS gets it’s own dialect.
Netscape submits a proposal to ECMA international to standardize JavaScript. Also the first version for Cascading Style Sheets comes in to play
1997
The first Edition of ECMAScript (ECMA-262)- Published
JavaScript is now guided by a consistent set of guidelines according to which it should be implemented
1998
Creation of Mozilla project from Netscape
ECMAScript 1 released with some editorial changes
1999
Microsoft releases XHR (XML HttpRequest)- AJAX
HTML generator JSDoc released
ECMAScript updates to version 3 with important enhancements (Regular Expressions, try/catch, error handling)
2000
Flash player 5 released with JavaScript support
Security vulnerabilities in web pages becomes imminent
Dawn of KHTML and Opera
2001
Transfer of first JSON message
IE6 released with critics rating it as a “least secure software on the planet”
2002
Birth of JSLint
Mozilla Firefox was released with better JS support than IE
2003
ECMAScript 4 abandoned
Steve Jobs unveils Safari (internal fork from KHTML)
2004
Canvas comes in to play from Safari
Gmail beta was released
2005
Release of Dojo toolkit
Adobe photoshop includes JavaScript support
Ajax gains attention
2006
Debut of jQuery
Yahoo launces YUI, one of the first minifiers of JavaScript
Google releases Web tool kit for compiling Java to JavaScript
2007
Ext JS 1.0 was released
First iPhone launched without Flash support
2008
Google Chrome beta with JS engine V8 released
WebSockets comes in to play
2009
Introduction of PhoneGap - A new cross-platform application category
ECMAScript gets revamped
Node.js introduced
2010
Angular.js and npm were born
JetBrains introduce WebStorm 1.0 - A new IDE for HTML, CSS and JavaScript
2011
Introduction of WebKit Remote Debugging
Works start for prototyping React
IE9 released with JIT compilation
2012
TypeScript made public
Introduction of WebPack module bundler
2013
React becomes open source
ESLint and React Native works underway
2014
Release of Vue.js
Babel.js works in progress
2015
ES2015 released with big updates (promises, classes and more)
Initial release of Redux, GraphQL and VS Code
2016
AngularJS becomes Angular with total rewrite
Next.js becomes open-source and ECMAScript 2016 released
2017
Release of Prettier 1.0
Nest.js released on npm
ECMAScript 2017 released with async/await and more
2018
React Hooks announced
Introduction of TensorFlow.js
2019
Array prototypes introduced in ECMAScript 2019
Svelte 3 released amidst developer speculations
2020
JavaScript makes in to space with SpaceX’s Dragon 2 interface built in JS
Deno1.0 released
ECMAScript 2020 released with Optional chaining and more for safe programming
Vue.js 3.0 released
Future
ECMAScript 2021 with Logical Assignments and more scheduled for June 2021
Having looked at the history it’s safe to assume that JavaScript is here to stay and with the new ECMAScript updates and in the emergence of new frameworks we can say JavaScript may evolve to a more powerful language.
There’s more in the JavaScript cookbook like native support for ML instructions, emergence of logical programming in line with functional programming, might serve as an interface for brain-machine communication and whatever interface the future holds for us.
Thank you Jetbrains for an awesome article on JavaScript history which helped me write this blog
