Using ES6 Today!
by Mark Volkmann, Partner
July 2014
The next version of JavaScript, defined by ECMAScript 6 (ES6), is packed with great, new features. There are many more significant additions than were provided in ES5. Firefox and Chrome are aggressively adding support for these and IE11 supports some, but it may be years before all popular browsers fully support ES6.
The good news is that you don't have to wait. You can use a transpiler today to convert ES6 code to ES5, enabling it to be run in current browsers and with Node.js. This process can be automated to occur whenever JavaScript file modifications are saved from any editor/IDE.
In a break from our normal format, the article this month is provided in the form of slides that were presented at a local user group recently. The slides contain enough detail to make them valuable without seeing the talk.
The slides describe tooling that enables use of ES6 (primarily Google Traceur) and provide an overview of many of the new features. These include modules, classes, arrow functions, default parameter values, destructuring, new collections, promises, for-of loops, iterators, generators, and more. After learning about these features, you won't want to wait to start using them!
Click here to download the slide presentation.
Software Engineering Tech Trends (SETT) is a regular publication featuring emerging trends in software engineering.
