Book Image

ECMAScript Cookbook

By : Ross Harrison
Book Image

ECMAScript Cookbook

By: Ross Harrison

Overview of this book

ECMAScript Cookbook follows a modular approach with independent recipes covering different feature sets and specifications of ECMAScript to help you become an efficient programmer. This book starts off with organizing your JavaScript applications as well as delivering those applications to modem and legacy systems. You will get acquainted with features of ECMAScript 8 such as async, SharedArrayBuffers, and Atomic operations that enhance asynchronous and parallel operations. In addition to this, this book will introduce you to SharedArrayBuffers, which allow web workers to share data directly, and Atomic operations, which help coordinate behavior across the threads. You will also work with OOP and Collections, followed by new functions and methods on the built-in Object and Array types that make common operations more manageable and less error-prone. You will then see how to easily build more sophisticated and expressive program structures with classes and inheritance. In the end, we will cover Sets, Maps, and Symbols, which are the new types introduced in ECMAScript 6 to add new behaviors and allow you to create simple and powerful modules. By the end of the book, you will be able to produce more efficient, expressive, and simpler programs using the new features of ECMAScript. ?
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
Dedication
PacktPub.com
Contributors
Preface
Index

Supporting new language features with Babel


In the previous recipe, we saw how to use the babel-polyfill library to support new ES methods. This add methods to the language at runtime, so that source code that depends on them runs correctly.

There are other language features that are relatively new to ECMAScript, such as the arrow function, let and const variable declarations, and spread operators. These features are not universally supported. Babel provides a mechanism to use them at the source level, and remain compatible with a build step.

This recipe demonstrates how to use Babel within webpack, in order to support these features in older browsers.

Getting ready

This recipe assumes that you have the code created in earlier recipes in this chapter, and that you have installed Python. Please visit these earlier recipes or copy the code.

How to do it...

  1. Open your command-line application and navigate to the directory containing the 02-creating-client-bundles package.
  2. Start the Python HTTP server...