JavaScript APIs

As stated earlier, when HTML was created, it was not meant to be used for the development of large enterprise applications. When JavaScript was first created back in 1995, its main goal was to provide a simple scripting language that would allow web designers to add some logic to their web pages. This too was not meant to be a foundation tool from which large, complex applications would be developed.

However, as we have seen with HTML itself, as well as CSS, JavaScript has become very widely used, and developers have outgrown its limited capabilities. Seeing the direction in which developers were taking the language, in an attempt to leverage the Web as a platform, browser vendors started to make improvements to JavaScript as much as was in their power. As a result, very powerful JavaScript engines have emerged. So, as JavaScript become even more used, and as browser became even more powerful, a new set of additions has been added to JavaScript.

Today JavaScript is the most popular scripting language used on the Web. Given its capabilities and the latest tooling available for it, JavaScript has become a very good option for the development of large applications, especially for games. The latest JavaScript APIs allow for 2D and 3D graphics rendering, thread-like behavior, sockets, embedded databases, and a whole lot more. Best of all, this new functionality is built with security in mind, and is not only available on desktop computers, but can also be used in most devices connected to the World Wide Web.

New JavaScript APIs

While the following is not a comprehensive list of all the new and upcoming APIs and language features, it does cover the most significant, stable additions to JavaScript, especially ones that we can leverage for game development. A more detailed explanation of each of the APIs listed in the following list, as well as usage examples, are available in subsequent chapters:

API	Definition
Canvas API	It renders 2D or 3D graphics
Web Audio API	It controls playback of audio files
Web Video API	It controls playback of video files
Geolocation API	It provides access to geographical location of hosting device
Web Socket API	It provides a protocol for two way communication with a remote server
Web Workers API	It provides a thread-like, background worker for concurrent execution
Messaging API	It provides mechanism for communication between different browser contexts
Web Storage API	It provides a key-value pair persistence mechanism
Indexed Database API	It provides a NoSQL object storage mechanism
Drag and Drop API	It provides a native mechanism for dragging and dropping objects
Selector API	It provides a mechanism to select DOM elements using CSS selectors

Note

There was another persistence API in HTML5 that was known as WebSQL. The spec for this API defined an asynchronous way to store and query data in the client using an actual built-in SQL-based database engine. The specification has been deprecated, and was replaced in its entirety by the more robust and more accepted IndexedDB API.