In January we brought Release Health to JavaScript. This month we’ve been thinking about the overall experience for JavaScript developers, some could call it JavaScript Jebruary. Think back to your last frustrating experience. It was probably caused by slow page loads or getting dizzy from staring at the ever-ending spinner. One survey showed that the average desktop load time on a webpage was 10.3 seconds and on mobile, it was 27.3 seconds.
It’s January 2021 and you’ve probably broken five out of six New Year’s Resolutions. I don’t want to be the reason for breaking your last one, so I’ll cut right to the chase. We just released an update to our JavaScript SDK with the ability to track the health of your releases and support for Web Assembly. Still with me? Great.
Some devs use JavaScript in the browser; some use JavaScript on the server. What if you do both?
Let’s talk about SPAs. It all starts from a blank page which is subsequently filled with HTML and JavaScript. If we take PHP pages as an example, they already come bundled with the server, which is an advantage in terms of performance, right? For situations like these, server-side rendering frameworks (such as Next.js) come to the rescue. They process the code on the server-side to pre-fill the HTML result page with something (if not the whole page) before it reaches the browser.
The year 2015 was marked by a new paradigm shift in web development. Google introduced Progressive Web Applications and JavaScript libraries and frameworks, such as React.js, Angular.js or Vue.js, created new development methodologies. By 2020, the web environment is flooded with PWAs based on reactive programming and built with cutting-edge frameworks.
Garbage collection (GC) is a very important process for all programming languages, whether it’s done manually (in low-level languages like C), or automatically. The curious thing is that most of us barely stop to think about how JavaScript — which is a programming language, and hence, needs to GC — does the trick. Like the majority of high-level languages, JavaScript allocates its objects and values to memory and releases them when they’re no longer needed. But, how?
