Using Different Flavors of JavaScript

With the previous chapter, you’ve completed the essentials for doing projects in Node.js. Looking at real projects out there, you’ll find quickly that people use Node.js with all kinds of flavors of JavaScript. A flavor of JavaScript is a new language that can be seen as a variation of the official JavaScript language standard. Mostly, these flavors look very much like the JavaScript you are used to but differ in key parts. Sometimes, they add new language constructs to simplify certain tasks; sometimes, they bring improvements for reliability before releasing any code.

In this chapter, we’ll learn how different flavors of JavaScript can be used with Node.js. We will introduce the most important tools and flavors. As far as the tooling part is concerned, we’ll introduce the popular open source package, Babel. This tool can be quite helpful to teach Node.js how to use a flavor of JavaScript. These flavors include interesting...