Chapter 2. ECMAScript 2015 and Browserify

JavaScript has quickly become the lingua franca of the Web and the language's syntax and semantics have long been in need of improvements. ECMAScript 2015 introduces a lot of syntactic sugar that makes writing JavaScript easier. It also provides many new useful concepts that simplify application development. We briefly introduced you to ES2015 in the previous chapter. We'll be delving deeper into ES2015, as it's important that you become familiar with what the new syntax looks like.

Furthermore, it can be extremely useful to reuse your own work and that of others as well. But doing so would require you to manage your dependencies and ensure that the appropriate libraries are included. Doing this manually can be painful; but you can leverage a tool such as Browserify to assist. Browserify is a utility that not only packages your JavaScript files along with their dependencies, but also provides a Node.js-like environment for the browser. This means that you can reuse the majority of the huge JavaScript repository that Node.js uses. After all, why reinvent the wheel if someone has already done the hard work?

In this chapter, we'll cover:

• New ES2015 syntax
• Using Browserify