JavaScript: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly

I recently read Michael Fogus's Functional JavaScript (O'Reilly). I've always enjoyed JavaScript as a language for it's balance of simplicity and complexity. It's a very flexible language, a bit of a hot mess, lipstick on a pig in places; and I still appreciate Crockford's book, The Good Parts, but really, in much the same way I am expecting a move away from libraries like JQuery and approaches that masquerade object-oriented principles in JS, I think that there is a lot to be said for gaining an appreciation for pure declarative JavaScript, which Underscore really facilitates.

I do think that in the future, picking an enabling framework like Ember or Angular will pay dividends, as a lot of functionality like Http/REST/JSON support becomes native and standardized in the browser. On mobile devices, look and feel may be prescribed by an open but proprietary set of styles and widgets. A good framework should enable the user experience, while supporting it transparently with good MV* pattern support for data binding. I really like Learning JavaScript Design Patterns by Addy Osmani, which explores the standard Java design patterns like Singleton, Modules and Observers, and then goes into the different Model View patterns in depth.

Once you take away a lot of the fiddly bits, JavaScript starts to look more like it's original intent - sophisticated and somewhat magical glue that holds together your required controllers. I like Angular because it takes a fundamental design approach that your HTML becomes your View, and contains the hooks that become your Model. With the Model View View-Model pattern, if you are building a lot of complicated controllers, it's possible that what you really need is more auto-wiring and dependency injection - the glue makes it magical.

For a small application, building functional JavaScript with a minimum of additional library support is liberating. For a larger application, picking a mature framework is a good way to go. In the middle, a consolidated platform built out of best of breed libraries may be a good solution, but I would still go with a mature framework. As a development manager, I am always looking for good resources both to help developers make the move from Java development or client-side development using JQuery or ActionScript, to using an appropriate framework or collection of libraries.

All of these books provide a lot of good code samples, but it is also worth noting that the current generation of libraries and frameworks, like Underscore, Backbone, Ember and Angular are terse enough that  you can refer to the underlying source, and also provide excellent references and quick starts for new developers. There is a lot of competition in this space, and good documentation and sample code often separates the Good from the Bad and the Ugly.