News from the
Bleeding Edge
Browser Pop Quiz
Last version check — May 2015:
Browser Pop Quiz
As of June 24, 2015:
Chrome Highlights
Version 44 (beta)
Firefox Highlights
Version 39 (beta)
- Lots of dev tools improvements
- Minor CSS and JS features
Opera
- Based on Chromium 43
- Support for the Media Source Extensions spec (MSE) with H.264
- New upgrade-insecure-requests CSP directive to avoid mixed secure/insecure content warnings
- Support for JavaScript copy/cut: execCommand('copy')
And more...
Still in preview, to be finalized with Windows 10 (July 29)
Interesting features added since last month:
- Support for the Dolby
Audio™ media format
- Support for the srcset attribute for responsive images
Safari & IE
(Safari
9 is coming soon though...)
The Elements of Harmony are six supernatural artifacts representing subjective aspects of
harmony. They are arguably the most powerful force in Equestria.
ES6 is Final!
- ES5 standardized in 2009
- ES6 first working draft published as "ES.next" on July 12,2011
- Feature-frozen in August 2014
- Approved and published as ECMA-262 6th Edition
on June 17, 2015 by Ecma General Assembly
This is great news for web app developers!
Need a refresher? Excellent intro to ES6 via code examples
Trivia Question
What does "ECMA" stand for?
Trivia Question
ECMA = European Computer Manufacturers Association
- Founded in Geneva in
1961, became Ecma International in 1994
- Netscape turned over JavaScript to Ecma for standardization in Nov 1996
- The ECMA-262 First Edition was published in June 1997
- "ECMAScript" was a compromise
mainly between Netscape (JavaScript) and Microsoft (JScript)
ECMAScript was always an unwanted trade name that sounds like a skin disease.
— Brendan Eich
Essentially 100% across IE9+, Chrome 23+, FF 21+, Safari 6+ and Opera 12+
Not quite as impressive... yet
ES6 features supported by major browsers today:
Good news: Babel is available today — covers 71% of ES6 already
Online (free) and print (paid) book by Dr. Axel Rauschmeyer
Everything you ever wanted to know about ES6 (and JS generally)
Background
We've been trying to run native code on the web for 20+ years
- Java applets
- ActiveX
- Flash
Issues: security, performance, difficult to develop
(Portable) Native Client
- Developed by Google
- NaCl compiles C/C++ to architecture-specific executables (~ActiveX)
- PNaCl produces intermediate bitcode, compiled by the browser (~Java)
Code is sandboxed for security
Compilation is AOT (ahead-of-time) not JIT for near-native performance
Chrome only
- Developed by Mozilla
- Strict subset of JS focused on AOT optimzation / performance
- Static languages like C can be compiled to asm.js, e.g. via Emscripten or Mandreel
Runs in all modern browsers, optimized in FF, Chrome and Edge
Slower than PNaCl, but much faster than vanilla JS
Same security model as JS
Read Brendan's announcement
(seriously, you should read it)
A new intermediate representation for safe code on the Web
- Or "wasm" — developed by Mozilla, Google, MS and others
- Essentially asm.js delivered in binary (bytecode) format
- Can be decoded much faster than JS can be parsed, especially on mobile
Why this a Big Deal:
- True cross-platform (asm.js) + native (PNaCl) code
- Backed by all major browser vendors via the W3C WebAssembly Community Group
- Much better compile target than plain JS
- Source will be human-readble
and hand-writable
- Designed to coexist with and enhance, not replace, JS
- Supports synchronous calls to/from plain JS
Using WebAssembly components from JS will be as simple as require'ing a module
A specification for building APIs in JSON
Version 1.0 of the spec released June 4
- It's basically REST optimized for JSON data
- Shared conventions for data structure, resource linking, caching, etc.
- Mime type application/vnd.api+json
- Free and MIT-licensed mobile app development framework
- Built on Angular and CSS
- Includes a CLI: ionic start MyApp
Released version 1.0 (uranium-unicorn) in May
Recently-released platform services in alpha:
New cross-platform mobile framework by Telerik
Released version 1.0
in May (1.1 just last week)
- Free, open source, built on JS + CSS
- Shared business logic / data models
- Integrates with Telerik Platform ($$)
- Modern mobile touch slider component
- Works on iOS, Android, Win Phone 8, desktop
- Supports parallax, transition effects, RTL, lazy loading, and more
And now for something completely different...
Version 8.0 final announced June 17
- 5,771 new ideographs for Chinese, Japanese and Korean
- 86 lowercase Cherokee syllables
- New languages supported: Arwi, Ik, Kulango
But most important of all...
One day, single-track JavaScript conference
July 24 at the Paramount
Unfortunately sold out, but Node.js
workshop still available
I'll be there ;)
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