Node.js and JS Foundations Are Merging To Form OpenJS (venturebeat.com)

The Linux Foundation today unveiled several major collaborative partnerships as it looks to cement the development of various open source projects that power much of the web. From a report: First off, the Node.js Foundation and the JS Foundation, which the Linux Foundation launched in 2016, are merging to form the OpenJS Foundation. The merger between the two chief organizations that focus on JavaScript comes six months after they publicly began to explore such a possibility with their communities. The OpenJS Foundation will focus on hosting and funding activities that support the growth of JavaScript and web technologies, the Linux Foundation said in a press release.

The OpenJS Foundation consists of 29 open source JavaScript projects including jQuery, Node.js, Appium, Dojo, and webpack. The merger is supported by 30 corporate and end user members including Google, Microsoft, IBM, PayPal, GoDaddy, and Joyent that recognize the "interconnected nature of the JavaScript ecosystem, and the importance of providing a neutral home for projects which represent significant shared value," the Linux Foundation said in a prepared statement. Also in the report: The Linux Foundation has created CHIPS Alliance, a project that aims to host and curate open source code relevant to design of chips that power mobile, IoT, and other consumer electronic devices; and the Continuous Delivery Foundation, which aims to serve as a platform for vendors, developers, and users to frequently engage and share insights and best practices to spur the development of open source projects.

It also announced that the GraphQL Foundation is collaborating with Joint Development Foundation to encourage "contributions, stewardship, and a shared investment from a broad group in vendor-neutral events, documentation, tools, and support for the data query language."

Comments

Somebody please flip some kill switches

[jtara]

Good. Or not. I guess. Yawn.

But... can somebody over there find the time to flip the kill switch on jQuery Mobile, and other abandoned projects? So that developers don't keep starting projects with libraries that haven't been updated in years?

Re:Somebody please flip some kill switches

[jtara]

What I mean by "flip the kill switch" - of course - is not to take the repos and documentation offline. But simply to state - officially and unequivocally - that it is a Dead Parrot.

jQuery Mobile is definitely in this state. jQuery UI is probably close to it. I am making the assumption that there are other dead birds littering the floor of the cage.

Re:Somebody please flip some kill switches

[AndrewFlagg]

nicely said. post the list as well, the top 100 dead parrots please so educators at K-12 and Higher Ed can stop regurgitating vomit in the classrooms. if its a history lesson, then fine, but say so.. some programmers coming out are using dead tech or bleeding tech... i won't hire either.

Re:And yet...

[Anonymous Coward]

There is a very popular library for parsing command line arguments.

All told it has 50 dependencies (this is counting sub-dependencies) counting in at over half a megabyte (610kB!).

To parse command line arguments, which is probably one of the simplest tasks out there.

Even better, while there are 50 dependencies, there are only 48 packages included: two of the those 50 dependencies are simply different versions, to satisfy versioning requirements of the tree.

All this is to say that, yes, the packaging system and the overuse of simple third party packages to accomplish simple tasks is still a thing in the JavaScript community. Some of those dependencies are literal one-liners, where the various packaging metadata is larger than the actual JavaScript code.

I see this as a problem ...

[Anonymous Coward]

interconnected nature of the JavaScript ecosystem

So every page you visit relies on this vast interconnected web of javascript, originating from places you as a user have no reason to trust.

There's too much javascript in webpages now, and every damned site wants to call out to a dozen other sites which run scripts ... and why should I be trusting every random asshole linked to by a website I visit to run scripts? Because I implicitly trust them because I'm sure the website operators are nice people?

Sorry, no, but third party javascript is blocked ruthlessly, because I have no reason to trust those third parties. I don't trust most websites to directly run scripts, why would I trust everyone they link to?

Now we have this massive connection of javascript which nobody really can explain what it all does, but we should just trust it?

Sorry, I want less javascript in my life, not more.

Re:I see this as a problem ...

[jellomizer]

Now I agree linking to external Javascript sites, just doesn't make much sense. As a website owner, you don't know if the end user would have access to connect to that site or not, as well you are trusting that site to be running for your site to run. I would rather put these libraries like jquery and angular on my own server and reference them myself from my server.

However the Web Today isn't like it was 20+ years ago. We need advanced client side processing to keep bandwidth and server utilization down. Back in the old days, when you wanted to save a form, or load additional data. A full screen refresh needed to happen, or you are using frames which has its own limitations. Now when you click reply that text box doesn't need to interact with the server until you hit that save button, and when you hit the save only the data that you need to save is saved.

When used correctly Javascript actually increases your browsing speed. The problem is not too many people can do it correctly, and there is a lot of really crappy (Business owners nephew, who can code HTML) code. Coded together with a bunch of Stack Exchange Examples, without any understanding on what is actually happening on their end.

Now as a Language Javascript is clumsy (much like PHP) and inconsistent and missing a lot of straight forward features, such as a sleep command. However there isn't many other options for Client Side Browser coding then Javascript that is widely supported across browsers.

For clariffication

[ArhcAngel]

Will this fusion be more like a Gotenks or Gogeta fusion?

Re:For clariffication

[Chris Mattern]

Will this fusion be more like a Gotenks or Gogeta fusion?

It'll be like a Yu-Gi-Oh fusion.

Re:For clariffication

[jellomizer]

I sacrifice my node.js and jquery, To fuse into OpenJS, I put my Dojo in defense mode, then I will end my turn.

The audience (in the show) gasps at such a bold course of action.
While we as the audience of the show, have no clue on what he did.

Re:And yet...

[xack]

One day someone will hack a critical package and we will have a Wannacry level event powered by JavaScript.

Joylent

[darkain]

Who the hell is Joylent!? I know who Joyent is, but not Joylent.

Is JS becoming worse than Perl?

[xanthos]

And this is coming from an old Perl Hacker. The biggest gripe against Perl has always been that it is a write once maintain never type of language. Unless done correctly, and it can be done correctly, it can be near impossible for anyone but the original author to maintain. And sometimes event the original author goes WTF? when they look back at stuff they had previously written. Been there done that. But can anyone say that JS is better? Between the dependencies and the convolutions taken to interact with the various DOM elements it gets ugly very very quickly. I get it that the browser sandbox it is runs in has limitations, but why hasn't a better alternative taken hold? In fact, why is anyone encouraging using this ClusterF of a language on servers via Node.js?

Re: Is JS becoming worse than Perl?

[hey00]

People encourage using it on servers because bad developers outweigh good ones by a wide margin, and all concentrated on js while good ones are spread on many languages.

Js is an easy language. Js with html and css is the simplest graphic api, and it's cross platform and require no installation to share your application.

Therefore it attracted most of the bad developers and those with no formal computer science education. I d bet that the proportion of web devs who don't know how to write a sort of an algorithm for a mildly complex problem is far higher than in any other language.

And npmjs made everything worse by making it even easier for non devs and bad devs to get into programming by encouraging them to rely on insane amounts of near trivial libraries and share their own crap code.

And those devs think it's a good idea to run js on servers, and they are numerous enough to successfully push that idea.

I'm getting paranoid

[Maelwryth]

"interconnected nature of the JavaScript ecosystem, and the importance of providing a neutral home for projects which represent significant shared value,"

Which I am reading as,"The largest players always win unless we completely jump the shark and do another Internet Explorer fiasco allowing another player in the field." I mean, really, neutral homes are all well and good but when you declare them after owning the house it reminds me of equality by equality vs equality by equity.

Abandon all hope

[Anonymous Coward]

They've merged to form Nodjla, Code of Nightmares.