Having the right tools enables a Livecoding.tv engineer to produce high-quality projects. Today we will share some of our secrets with you as to what JavaScript productivity tools, plugins, and libraries our streamers use to assist us to be highly proficient.
What Is JavaScript?
“JavaScript is a young-for-its-age language. It was originally intended to do small tasks in webpages, tasks for which Java was too heavy and clumsy. But JavaScript is a surprisingly capable language, and it is now being used in larger projects.”(JSLint). The Meteor JavaScript framework often used for building real-time mobile and Web apps, will now transition to NPM as a means to access third-party application packages.
JavaScript Productivity Tools, Plugins & Libraries
Here are the ten (10) best JavaScript productivity tools, plugins, and libraries recommended by Livecoding.tv engineers:
Git
Git is a free and open source distributed version control system designed to handle everything from small to very large projects with speed and efficiency, and comes highly recommended by Livecoding.tv engineers.
JSDoc
JSDoc 3 is an API documentation generator for JavaScript, similar to JavaDoc or PHPDoc. You add documentation comments directly to your source code, right along side the code itself. The JSDoc Tool will scan your source code, and generate a complete HTML documentation website for you.
JSLint
JSLint is a JavaScript program that looks for problems in JavaScript programs. It is a code quality tool.
Grunt
Another productivity tool highly recommended by Livecoding.tv engineers is Grunt. Grunt is a task-based command line build tool for JavaScript projects. Grunt and Grunt plugins are installed and managed via npm, the Node.js package manager.
Gulp
According to Antonios Minas, in his article at TOPTAL, An Introduction to JavaScript Automation with Gulp, “Gulp is a build system that employs Node.js’s streams to implement an asynchronous source-destination approach to automation. Everything is written in JavaScript, so it is easy for anyone with intermediate coding knowledge to get started.” Check out the remainder of the article, which makes for a very interesting read.
QUnit
QUnit is a powerful, easy-to-use JavaScript unit testing framework. It’s used by the jQuery, jQuery UI and jQuery Mobile projects and is capable of testing any generic JavaScript code, including itself. .
Jasmine
Jasmin is an assembler for the Java Virtual Machine. It takes ASCII descriptions of Java classes, written in a simple assembler-like syntax using the Java Virtual Machine instruction set. It converts them into binary Java class files, suitable for loading by a Java runtime system.
Istanbul
Istanbul is a Javascript code coverage tool written in JS. It can be used on the command line as well as a library.
Webpack
Webpack is a module bundler. It takes modules with dependencies and generates static assets representing those modules.
Bower
Web sites are made of lots of things — frameworks, libraries, assets, and utilities. Bower manages all these things for you. Bower can manage components that contain HTML, CSS, JavaScript, fonts or even image files. Bower doesn’t concatenate or minify code or do anything else – it just installs the right versions of the packages you need and their dependencies.
In Conclusion
That’s it! The ten (10) best JavaScript productivity tools, plugins, and libraries to help you become more productive according to Livecoding.tv engineers. What are your favorite JavaScript productivity tools? What did we miss in this list that definitely needs to be added to make it complete?
