JavaScript achievements of the Year 2017 and key Frontend’s trends

A brief overview of major frontend achievements in 2017, including CSS Grid and ES2017 features.

Hi! Let's talk about JavaScript achievements of the Year 2017 and key Frontend’s trends. I'm Anatol and you are watching the Good Parts of the Frontend development. 1) Grid CSS Apparently the main achievement this year for the Front-end community is the Grid CSS specification rollout. Nowadays all major browsers support this feature. CSS Grids live their lives in Chrome, Firefox and Opera. In addition, Firefox has got a CSS Grid Inspector Tool - an excellent add-on to cope with the Grid's complexity. 2) ES8/ES2017 ES2017 (the 8th edition of the JavaScript Spec) was officially released and published at the end of June by TC39. JavaScript has been enhanced with new possibilities for Strings (like padStart and padEnd), Objects (like values and entries), and more. Nothing has been changed significantly, however, the third year in a row we’re spectating on the continuous JavaScript evolution and that makes sense. 3) async/await Perhaps ES2017 async/await is the best thing that’s ever happened to JavaScript. You can write a cleaner code using it. “Promises” cured the "callback hell". But now no callbacks, no .then(). Just going to the next line. It’s worth mentioning that Node supports async/await out of the box. 4) Polymer v.2 This spring the Polymer version 2 was finally delivered with ES6 class-based syntax support. It built on incredibly lightweight core. It’s not a matter of Polymer, but of Web Components under the hood. The idea of the customized and extendable components is inspirational and can change our development experience. 5) Node 8 and V8 6 TF+I, w/ npm@5 Node version 8 got into Long Term Support (LTS) and its predecessor is off the game. The release contains v8 with TurboFan and Ignition making JS code even faster. Also NPM version 5 has been published! This new npm version is a pretty big step forward. It seems "yarn" pushes "npm" forward. It’s a win-win situation for the developer. I think, it's a good start. 6) yarn 1.0 Yarn version 1 point 0 has been kicked off. Yarn has got the workplaces for mono-repositories, lockfile auto-merging and a better code performance. To my mind Yarn won’t be able to replace npm. Nonetheless, the competitor delivered a good punch to the giant. 7) Webpack 2/3 Just yesterday Webpack was upgraded to ver.2 and today the version 3 has been issued. It includes Scope Hoisting, "Magic Comments", and an ability to pass chunk name as an inline comment to your import() statement, etc. But for me the most exciting thing is the promise to deliver Webpack in a faster and more stable release cycle. So, I’m looking forward to version 4. 8) GraphQL Facebook introduced GraphQL. It's a new API that provides a more efficient, powerful and flexible alternative to REST. With GraphQL, each client can access precisely the data it needs. 9) Facebook product was moved from BSD+Patents to MIT license One more news from Facebook. After much thoughts this company relicensed React, Jest, Flow, and Immutable.js by MIT licens