Chapter 1. JavaScript for Modern Web Applications

The growth in web development evolved with a rapid pace in recent years. Most of the business applications that developed on a desktop platform are now shifted to the web platform, and the reason is the ease of access and continuous addition of rich capabilities on the web platform. Typically, any web application that provides the characteristics of the desktop applications is considered as rich web application. Thus, it involves extensive use of JavaScript and its frameworks and libraries.

JavaScript plays an important role in developing rich applications and allows developers to do less server-side post-backs and call server-side functions through ajaxified requests. Not only this, but now many companies and communities are developing good frameworks such as Angular, Knockout, ReactJS, and so on to bring state-of-the-art and groundbreaking capabilities. Microsoft has also released the WinJS library to access mobile native device features such as camera, storage, and so on from a web application running on mobile browsers. myNFC is also a great JavaScript library that allows developers to create applications for smartphones.