JavaScript Tools

Introduction To JavaScript Tools

JavaScript is one of the popular programming languages in the world. It was developed by Netscape to add dynamic elements to websites. It is an object-oriented scripting language for web pages. Thus, to create an application from JavaScript, we need a platform to create it and these platforms are the JavaScript tools that aids to create applications. Different tools have different significance based on applications.

Types Of JavaScript Tools

Given below are the types of JavaScript tools:

• Documentation Tools: JSDoc Toolkit, jGrouseDoc
• Debugging Tools: Debug bar, Drosera
• Testing and Validation Tools: J3Unit, JSLitmus, JSLint, Mocha
• Imaging and Graphic Tools: Reflectionjs, flot
• Code Optimization Tools: JSMIN, JSMinifier, Scriptlizer
• Security Tools: jsfuzzer, AttackAPI
• Authoring Tools: Google Web Toolkit, jx
• Backend Tools: Node.Js, Express.Js
• Frontend Tools: React, AngularJS, Backbone.js
• Task Runners: Gulp, Grunt
• Package Managers: npm, Yarn

JavaScript Frontend Tools

• The front-end is the part where the end-users interact to get their task done. Thus the programmers need to make it very handy and easier for the end-users to work or get their task done.
• Developers make sure that the application, a browser should be pleasing to the eye, catchy texts to attract users, have a user-friendly environment.
• Thus to attain these JavaScript tools are used.

Web Component

These are the APIs that allow to the creation of reusable custom elements which are encapsulated HTML tags and these can be used in web pages and web apps. The main intention of Web components is to avoid code collisions, have code reusability thus making programmers easy to concentrate on a project rather than the code platform itself. Some are major features of web components are encapsulation, extensibility, scoping, interoperability, maintainability, etc.

The 3 main technologies of web development are:

• Custom Elements: These are JavaScript APIs that allow to use of their templates, tags, and behavior and have flexibility with the bottom-up approach with HTML elements.
• Shadow DOM (Document Object Model): This is used for encapsulation in web components. In this functionality of DOM will be controlled and rendered by shadow DOM and the main DOM will not be affected. In this way, element’s features can be kept in private and the fear of collision is avoided
• HTML Templates: This helps to insert HTML elements into the web browser. To enable backward compatibility, a JavaScript library, Polyfill can be used. Some of the widely used browsers are Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Opera, etc.

TypeScript

• JavaScript was presented as a language for the client-side. With the development of Node.js JavaScript became the leading server type technology.
• As we know that the code gets messier as JavaScript code develops to an advanced level and thus there is a delay in compile-time and error checks, this restricts JavaScript to work as fully-fledged server-side technology.
• Thus, keeping this in mind, TypeScript was developed. So, in short, TypeScript is JavaScript for application/service-based development. It is a typed superset of JavaScript developed by Microsoft.

Advantages Of TypeScript

Below are the advantages of TypeScript:

• It helps in finding out the errors in codes: In JavaScript you need to write the whole code and then test it which may take a long time to find out the errors, this problem is avoided in TypeScript.
• Strong static typing: This is optional for TypeScript if JavaScript’s dynamic typing is preferred. JavaScript is not strongly typed and thus you need to write the whole code and check for errors. TypeScript being static type, compiling can be done for each code. The type interface system is done through TLS (TypeScript language service) for static typing.
• Similar features of JavaScript: Some of the similar features are OOP, DOM manipulation, ES6 features.
• It’s open-source and runs on any browser.

ReactJs

• React was developed by Facebook and is one of the most popular front-end JavaScript libraries for creating reusable UI components. React is used in Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram. React can be used on both the client-side and server-side. It uses data patterns that improve readability and improves the speed of the applications.
• Many websites nowadays are created using MVC architecture (model view controller) where V is the react and architecture is provided by Flux and Redux. React JS uses components as their basic block and thus it is the heart of all ReactJS applications. It consists of multiple components and each component can be a reusable piece of HTML code. These components can be nested with other components to create complex applications.
• Whenever a webpage is loaded DOM (document object model), an object is created. Thus for every reloading of page DOM will be created, this repeated object creation is unnecessary and there is memory wastage which in turn reduces the performance of the application.
• Thus to overcome this ReactJS was built. ReactJS uses virtual DOM and it changes individual DOM elements instead of refreshing the entire DOM. In this, the applications are divided into various components and the web page uses React to work on virtual DOM rather than the browser’s DOM. Thus when the browser is refreshed, only the changed or updated data will be loaded to the main DOM and the data with the same information will be left behind, thus the creation of unnecessary data will be avoided.

AngularJS

AngularJS is an open-source JavaScript framework developed by Google for web development applications and is used for single-page applications.

• It’s used for creating Rich Internet Application (RIA).
• Provides the advantage of writing client-side applications using JavaScript MVC.
• It’s used for large-scale, easy handling, and high-performance applications.
• It has data binding capability to HTML.
• It is unit-testable and has reusable components.

Conclusion

In this article, we have seen several tools of JavaScript. We saw the introduction to JavaScript, we also saw various tools of JavaScript like JavaScript Frontend tools in which we saw some tools in detail like Web Component, Typescript, ReactJS and AngularJS.

Recommended Articles

This is a guide to JavaScript Tools. Here we discuss a brief overview on JavaScript tools like frontend tools, backend tools, security, package, debugging and many more tools. You can also go through our other suggested articles to learn more –

1. Is JavaScript Object Oriented?
2. What JavaScript Can Do?
3. Introduction to JavaScript
4. Uses of JavaScript