ES6

Now that I’ve settled in Austin, I was excited to be able to attend my first Austin tech event. Hosted by the Google Developer and Javascript Austin meetup groups, the event focused on ways developers can begin learning and experimenting with the up-and-coming JavaScript standards, EcmaScript 6 & 7.

On the outside, I played it cool, but inside I couldn’t help my excitement as I entered the headquarters of Evernote (a very popular application on the market today). On top of that, not only was there free pizza, but also a selection of free local beers!? Austin rocks!

Ok so I was sure to take notes, and of course I will share:

Our presentation was hosted by Richard Anaya of ESO Solutions. He discussed the new features of ES6 and 7. All of which can be found at the Babel website.

If you visit https://babeljs.io , you can use their compiler tool to experiment with ES6, and compile regular old JavaScript code that works in similar fashions.

Some discussed features which stood out to me were:

• Native support of Classes without prototyping!
• Arrow Functions/Lambdas, which can replace the far too common anonymous function
• Native support of default parameters
• The new Operator :: can be used to bind handlers, like this::eventHandler
• With Object Observation, you can watch for changes on an object
• Class Decorators provide an easy way to add functionality across multiple class members by essentially adding a “tag” to a class
• Async is made a lot easier with native support of promises
• The new loop “For… of” will basically be an improvement of the “for” loop
• Generators - Using a new "next" feature, these can return a different value each time a function is called based on a built-in iterator

Next week, I’ll be attending some events at Austin Startup Week.