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

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:And yet...

[xack]

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

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.