EcmaScript

EcmaScript is the standard name for JavaScript (ECMA-262).

This is the main history of the versions:

  • ECMAScript 3 (December 1999) Used for 10 years.

  • ECMAScript 4 (Abandoned)

  • ECMAScript 5 (December 2009)

  • ES2015 a.k.a. ES6 (class, arrow functions, spread, Promise …)

  • ES2016 a.k.a. ES7 (…)

  • ES2017 a.k.a. ES8 (…)

  • ES2018 a.k.a. ES9 (…)

  • ES2019 a.k.a. ES10 (…)

  • ES2020 a.k.a. ES11 (Optional chaining, Nullish Coalescing, dynamic import)

In order use new standards, before 2014/2015, the applications had to wait the updates of the internet browsers from the users, that was not automatic like in the most modern ones.

Many stakeholders from 2014/2015 started pushing for new features, helped by transpilers (source-to-source compilers) like Babel, that allowed to use new language features and extensions and have their code converted to a version compatible with most of the browsers.

In this section we will see the main new features of ECMAScript that are frequently used in MapStore.

Note

This is not a full course of ECMAScript 6 to 11. For the full set of the new features of ECMAScript, you can check the W3C site