New Script

In 1995, Netscape and Sun Microsystems announced the official arrival of the JavaScript scripting language. According to the original press release, JavaScript was intended as "… an open, cross-platform object scripting language for the creation and customization of applications on enterprise networks and the Internet." [1] The goal was to create a scripting language for the emerging HTML-based Internet that would run easily in the browser client context and would also have uses on the server side. The subsequent browser wars led to many battles over the role of JavaScript as a core technology for the Internet. Microsoft developed its own JavaScript-like language, which they called JScript, and the two implementations bore a striking resemblance but were just different enough to cause problems for web developers trying to write cross-platform programs.

The ECMA-262 specification emerged as an attempt to standardize JavaScript-like languages, so programmers would be able to operate independently of a single vendor. The programming language standardized in the ECMA-262 specification came to be known as ECMAScript [2]. ECMAScript still exists as a universal JavaScript-like language tailored for web development environments. The ECMAScript project website even calls ECMAScript "the language of the web," [3] and the standard is still an important means for understanding and predicting the evolution of web technologies.

JavaScript, JScript, and other alternatives such as Adobe's ActionScript, all offer compatibility with ECMA-262 and the universal ECMAScript language. The current version of the language is ECMAScript version 5, but version 6 is already available in draft form, and support for ECMAScript 6 is starting to appear in many popular browsers. Version 6 actually addresses some problems associated with contemporary versions of JavaScript

This article offers a quick preview for what you'll find in ECMAScript 6. I'll summarize some new features that will one day make their way into JavaScript and other compatible languages. I'll also describe a sample application – a metronome for the browser [4] created with the help of ECMAScript 6, the Traceur compiler, HTML5, the Web Audio API, and CSS3.

New Language Resources

ECMAScript 6 hardly invents anything new; instead, it resorts to tried and tested assets from other languages. For example, the new version with arrow functions introduces Lambda functions (known from, e.g., Haskell). They reduce the amount of typing for function definitions and lexically bind the special this variable. In the expression

[2,4,6,8].map(x => x+1)

x => x+1 describes a callback function that, up to now, programmers could only define as function(x) {return x+1}.

Familiar constants from C are also new. The const keyword introduces the definition of constants in ECMAScript 6; for example, const c = 7;. The value of constants, as in C, cannot be overwritten.

The let keyword at the beginning of a variable definition, for example let x = 2;, restricts the visibility of the variables to the surrounding block. Listing 1 contains let in the header of a for loop in the first line. The x variable defined by let is undefined outside the loop. If the keyword var were used in place of let, x in line 4 would have a value of 1.

Class Conscious

ECMAScript 6 for the first time offers the ability to create objects using a class in a fashion similar to Java. Listing 2 shows the definition of two classes as per the new standard. The class keyword introduces the definition for the Creature class in line  1, which is followed by the class constructor function (lines 2-5) with the body surrounded by curly brackets. The function is run when creating an object, as in

new Creature('Bob', 'friendly')

The constructor function assigns the values of the name and age call parameters from line 2 to the name and age attributes in lines 3 and  4.

Inheritance

The definition of the class Human (lines 8-17) is derived from the Creature class using the extends keyword. The constructor function from Human calls the parent class constructor function in line 10 using the super() function. Instances of Human thus inherit the properties name and age.

Human also contains the toString() method. Its definition begins with the name followed by an empty parameter list and ends with the function block in curly brackets. The toString() block creates a representation of the object as a string. The method also uses a string literal expression in line  15.

String literals are also new in ECMAScript 6. Quoted in backticks, the parameter expansion occurs in the form ${<Variable name}>} – in a similar style to Bash. To test it, line 19 evaluates the expression

(new Human('Bob', 3, 'friendly')).toString()

The log() method writes the result Bob (3) is a friendly human to the browser console.

As with Node.js, developers can outsource functionality into modules with ECMAScript 6. Listing 3 first shows a module. The export keyword causes the module to export the pub variable in line 2 and the pubObj class in line 3. The priv variable from line  1, on the other hand, remains internal. Only the module itself can access it, as in line 5.