JS of Things

An introduction to the King of the web, the most important language for a web developer to learn!

There are 3 languages all web developers must learn, we’ve encountered two of them during the previous episodes: HTML to define the content of web pages, CSS to specify the layout of web pages and today we’re going to learn about the third, JavaScript, also known as JS.

What is JavaScript?

JavaScript is one of the most popular and widely used programming languages in the world right now and for a long time. It’s growing faster than many others and big companies like Netflix and PayPal build entire applications around JavaScript. Also, there are great chances to get a good job thanks to learning JS, you can work as a front-end developer, back-end or even full stack and you can be paid really well.

indeed.com

JavaScript and Java

JavaScript and Java are completely different languages, both in concepts and designs. It’s true that both can be used on the web but there are many differences between the two. For example, while Java applets can run in a browser, applets are mostly a thing of the past. On the other hand, JavaScript is used to render dynamic content on webpages across the globe. This makes the idea that JavaScript is “the language of the web” while Java is a “backend” language.

Add JavaScript for Dynamic Pages

JavaScript translates your static page into one that can interact with your visitors without them needing to wait for a new page to load every time they make a request. It adds behavior to the web page where the page responds to actions.

No longer does your visitor need to fill out an entire form and submit it in order to be told that they made a typo in the first field and need to enter it all again. With JavaScript, you can validate each of the fields as they enter it and provide immediate feedback when they make a mistake.

JavaScript also allows your page to be interactive in other ways that do not involve forms at all. You can add animations into the page that either attracts attention to a specific part of the page or that makes the page easier to use. You can provide responses within the web page to various actions that your visitor takes so as to avoid the need to load new web pages to respond. You can even have the JavaScript load new images, objects, or scripts into the web page without needing to reload the entire page.

Just an example of what you can achieve

Is JavaScript used only for web development?

We mentioned before that JS went beyond the browser and now it runs on the server too. Actually it’s not just that, with JavaScript, you can do more, you can do pretty much everything like:

• Games: you can develop something really simple like the one in the gif or even more advanced games like ‘Flappy Bird’ or ‘Gods Will Be Watching’.

• Mobile and Desktop Apps: Many JS frameworks (we’ll discuss the meaning of this in a future episode) like React Native are used to build mobile apps. Others like Electron can be used to build cross-platform desktop apps, actually VS Code, Twitch and many others are built with Electron.
• Machine Learning: Things like Voice/Sound Recognition, Text Based Applications can be easily done using some JavaScript libraries such as TensorFlow and ConvNetJS, you can use them to perform Classification, Perception, Understanding, Discovering, Prediction and Creation.

So yeah, JavaScript is extremely powerful and you learning it will make you unstoppable. I really recommend that you invest time to dive deeper into it.

I wanna stop here for this episode, i didn’t want to start coding but that’s what i’m going to do in the next article.

Thank you for reading and seeya soon 😄!

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