JavaScript for Line of Business Applications

This article assumes that the reader has a good knowledge of JavaScript and has done at least some development in it, but if this is not about you, you can just first refer to one of the beginner’s JavaScript books like Eloquent JavaScript.

JavaScript is an amazing, often underappreciated and misunderstood language. It has some really powerful concepts like functions as first-class citizens (see, for example, JavaScript: The World’s Most Misunderstood Programming Language), flexible prototypal inheritance and is a powerful generic programming language that can be used not only in browsers.

Despite all its power and flexibility the language has some well-known design shortcomings such as global variables, cumbersome emulation of lexical scoping, non-intuitive implicit conversions, etc. In fact, there are parts of the language that you better avoid using at all, as it is advised in JavaScript: The Good Parts. Let us also note that from the beginning JavaScript was not specifically designed for developing applications with large code bases and many developers involved.

Contents:
* Why JavaScript Isn’t Enough?
* Example JavaScript Program: Dijkstra’s Algorithm
* CoffeeScript
* TypeScript
* Dart
* Web Application Development
* ECMAScript 6
* Conclusions