This ain't your mama's JavaScript... Working on the irrigation supervisor software has me doing some JavaScript development again. It's been a few years since the last time I tried doing anything non-trivial in the web browser environment, so I've been being careful in my assumptions. It's a darned good thing I'm doing so, because JavaScript has changed so much I can hardly recognize it. It's all good, too!
I could list lots of changes that I've noticed, but I can convey the flavor of it with a single example. I wanted to do a SHA-256 digest (of a password) in the browser. In the past, I'd do a web search for someone's library, download it, and incorporate it in my project. This time when I did the web search, I discovered the Web Cryptography API, which I'd never even heard of before. It's supported in every browser I can ever imagine being concerned with, it's open source, and it's been reviewed. As just one of its bazillion capabilities, it has a digest function that supports SHA-256. Awesome!
Taken as a whole, the new stuff that's widely supported looks a awful lot like the kind of rich library environment I'm used to in Java programming. Furthermore, the browsers have moved far closer to a universal standard than they were even just a few years ago. These changes make JavaScript a vastly more pleasant programming environment that I am quite enjoying...
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