Chapter 12. ES6 Solutions Today
I cannot count the number of times I have mentioned upcoming versions of JavaScript in this book. It is somewhat frustrating that the language is not keeping pace with the requirements of application developers. Many of the approaches we've discussed become unnecessary with a newer version of JavaScript. Work is progressing on ECMAScript 6 (ES6), but browser support is spotty at best (http://caniuse.com/). There are, however, some ways to get the next version of JavaScript working today.
In this chapter, we'll look at a couple of these, specifically:
- TypeScript
- Traceur
TypeScript
There is no shortage of languages that compile to JavaScript. CoffeeScript is perhaps the best known example of one of these languages, although the Google Web Toolkit that compiles Java to JavaScript was also once very popular. Never ones to be left behind or use somebody else's solution, Microsoft released a language called TypeScript in 2012. It is designed...