JavaScript was first launched in 1995. It's been over 24 years; and in recent years, JavaScript has become extremely popular among the software development industry. Currently, it's used by 99% of all top websites.
JavaScript is the most popular programming language and the fastest growing programming language 6-years in a row (Stack Overflow Stats). Also, JavaScript is the only programming language understood by the browser.
Nowadays, JavaScript is used almost everywhere.
In addition to being the only cross-browser scripting language, it's also used as a back-end language (Thanks to Node.js).
Node.js was released in 2009, you can see the trend below
Source: GitHub language trends and the fragmenting landscape
Ajax
Ajax uses JavaScript to reload certain portions of web pages without reloading the entire page. Pretty cool hun? 😎
Ajax stands for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML. Ajax is not a technology but a technique which is used in web programming to transfer information over the internet. Websites and web apps using Ajax are faster to navigate than traditional ones.
Sites and applications using AJAX technique: Gmail, Facebook, YouTube, Google and Google Maps, etc.
jQuery
jQuery is a must know JavaScript library for every Front-end developer. jQuery makes you a better web developer.
jQuery is a JavaScript library that is tremendously helpful to use when doing website design. A JavaScript library is a collection of several pre-coded features that a web designer would commonly use.
jQuery popularity
If you go to the website called BuiltWith you can find out what websites are using jQuery. If I type jQuery and hit enter and go to jQuery usage statistics you will see that according to Quantcast top 10k websites use jQuery.
Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Dell, Bank of America and other popular websites use jQuery as well.
Node.js
Node.js is an open-source, cross-platform run-time environment for developing server-side web applications.
JavaScript can now also be used as a server-side language through the Node.js framework, and in recent years the community has gained a lot of momentum.
Note: Node.js is not a platform, it's not a framework. Actually, Node JS is a run-time for JavaScript that allows you to run JavaScript on the machine itself. Historically speaking, JavaScript was designed for the browser. So you would create a website, User interactions, and all kinds of logic would be written in JavaScript and it would run in the browser only.
But with the help of Node.js, you can run JavaScript on the machine. This means that now JavaScript can run on the browser as well as on the machine. JavaScript can now replace and compete with other programming languages such as Ruby, Python, Java, PHP, etc.
With Node.js, now you can build:
- Back-End of any Website
- Blogs
- Survey App
- Chat App
- Social Media App
- Web API
- Data Processing apps
- Shopping Cart
- Game Engines
- Desktop App
PayPal, LinkedIn, Yahoo, Mozilla, Netflix, Uber, Groupon, GoDaddy, and eBay are some of the companies who use Node.js in a major way.
There's no doubt JavaScript will do great in the future. More and more developers will learn JavaScript than any other language. One of the reasons is because Node.js is so successful.
With the increasing usage of desktop, tablet, and smartphones, JavaScript, of course, has a very lustrous future. The advantage of JavaScript is that it's native to the web, and the web is everywhere.
There are lots of frameworks and libraries developed with JavaScript: jQuery, Node, Angular, React, Meteor, backbone, ember, and much more. We will definitely see a lot more JavaScript apps in the near future.
Final Thoughts
JavaScript will remain a very popular language for years to come. it would be suicide to your career as a web developer not to know it. It's foreseeable that JavaScript will not only conserve but extend its hold of the overall software industry during the coming years.
Here is a full curriculum to becoming a front-end and full-stack JavaScript developer. iLoveCoding takes you from zero to giving you all the technical skills to becoming a job-ready software engineer.
I hope you enjoyed reading this blog. If you have any question, leave your comments below.
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