OpenJS Foundation Welcomes the Next 25 Years of JavaScript
OpenJS Foundation is hosting OpenJS World 2021 – June 2-3, free registration, fully virtual – showing strong momentum in membership, open source project graduations, and community program engagement
SAN FRANCISCO – June 2, 2021 – The OpenJS Foundation, providing vendor-neutral support for open source JavaScript communities, convened its annual global conference OpenJS World today, where through a series of updates and insights, a diverse array of global technology leaders described the emerging post-pandemic era as a time of growth and stability for technology and society.
Updates included advancements in use cases, from web performance to AI to massive-scale JavaScript deployments supporting critical enterprise infrastructure, as well as a broad commitment to make participation open to all backgrounds and geographies. OpenJS also featured new members, project updates and its individual supporter program JavaScriptLandia.
“We are at the precipice of the boom years for JavaScript evidenced by the diverse, multi-stakeholder communities that make up the OpenJS Foundation,” said Todd Moore, Chair of the Board of Directors and VP of Open Technology and Developer Advocacy at IBM. “We continue to see JavaScript projects maturing, providing stability, with new projects being released in innovative new ways.”
“So much of the web depends on JavaScript and our OpenJS projects, so we want OpenJS to be a force for good,” said Robin Ginn, executive director of the OpenJS Foundation. “Supporting open and healthy communities who build and use our open source JavaScript projects can create more opportunities for cultural and business impact.”
Prioritizing Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI)
As part of ongoing efforts to foster a more inclusive space to collaborate, OpenJS Foundation has significantly strengthened its DEI programs. Drawing on the leadership of the Inclusive Naming Initiative, OpenJS and its projects have taken action to remove harmful language in GitHub repos in a consistent way across the industry. The Foundations is inviting others to participate in its Cross Project Council DEI Working Group so issues facing underserved communities can be better understood and clear actions to make progress can be taken.
Individual Supporter Program Open to All
JavaScriptLandia is the new OpenJS Individual Supporter Program, announced earlier this spring, with an intentionally accessible $25 annual fee. The program provides benefits such as supporters’ weekly newsletter, discounts for training, certification, conferences, and other exclusive offers, a digital badge to add to your online profiles, recognition on the OpenJS website, and more. Today we are launching our dedicated JavaScriptLandia site, javascriptlandia.org, where participants can collect badges from their favorite OpenJS JavaScript projects.
To learn more about OpenJS’s Individual Supporter Program JavaScriptLandia and to sign up now, please click here.
OpenJS Welcomes NodeXperts and Stream as new members and Netflix upgrades
Member support is crucial to the success of the Foundation. The OpenJS Foundation welcomes several new members during the event including Bloomberg, NodeXperts and Stream as Silver members. Netflix has also upgraded its membership to Gold, a true testament of the value of the foundation. JavaScript is core to each of these companies’ leadership positions in the market, and by supporting OpenJS, they are supporting the infrastructure and long-term growth of key open source projects that they rely on.
Milestones from OpenJS Project Communities
With 38 successful open source projects, OpenJS is directly supporting JavaScript development in myriad technical and non-technical ways. Some of the main recent milestones include an AMP plugin for WordPress, Electron shipping v13, and Node.js 16 being released.
AMP Plugin for WordPress
AMP plugin for WordPress provides guidelines on best practices, solutions and effective control mechanisms to better the overall performance. It aims to improve page building experiences. It features many new capabilities in utility, performance and flexibility.
Electron v13
The release of Electron 13.0.0 has come with many new updates including an upgrade to Chrome 91, and API additions to session and webContents. Electron also shipped v11 that significantly improved performance. Electron 11 updates included support for Apple M1, added v8 crash message location information, and better performance of sending wide objects over the context bridge.
Node.js 16
The latest release’s main features include updating V8 JavaScript engine to 9.0 and pre-built Apple Silicon binaries. This update was made possible thanks to the hard work put in by Node.js contributors and project contributors! Additionally, the Node.js Mentorship Initiative team is offering an opportunity to work with N-API working group members with a goal in sight to eventually join them as full-time developers. The vision of the N-API team is to make the development of native addons for Node.js smoother; They actively work on improving test coverage, adding new features to N-API and creating templates for native plug-in authors to follow. To apply for this program, click here.
Introducing Package Vulnerability Management & Reporting Collaboration Space
The Package Vulnerability Management & Reporting Collab Space will create a neutral forum for ecosystem stakeholders to discuss and collaborate with the intention to improve CVE reporting and resolution workflows while minimizing the burden on maintainers quieting noise for consumers. This cross-functional effort has a wide reach and impacts Security Research/Organizations, Package Maintainers, and End-users/Consumers.
LoopBack joins OpenJS Foundation as Incubation Project
OpenJS welcomes LoopBack as the newest incubation project to the foundation. LoopBack is a popular Node.js framework for API creation and a platform to build large scale Node.js applications using proven patterns with TypeScrip. It also supports SOAP and enterprise databases. LoopBack has been supported at IBM with broad support from the outside community, with almost half of its pull requests coming from community members.
Incubation Projects Moving to Graduation Status
At the heart of OpenJS are its Incubation Projects that are working to complete their on-boarding requirements, so that they can move out of incubation. Congratulations to our new Graduation projects nvm and NativeScript.
nvm Graduation
nvm works on increasing accessibility by providing a convenient way of installing and managing the different versions of Node.js. Some areas that nvm benefits developers include the ability to install Node on any Posix-compliant system that has curl/wget and the ability to switch between node versions per-shell.
NativeScript Graduation
NativeScript is streamlining language switching and IDE jumping. This has led to multiple opportunities in the reuse of code between web and mobile development, thus helping to expand the reach of JavaScript.
Training and Certification
OpenJS offers Node.js Training and Certification programs which were developed in partnership with NodeSource and Nearform. These courses help users work on standing out in the job market, and helps companies easily source talent.
To learn more about and benefit from the OpenJS Node.js Training and Certification programs, click here.
Certification has already had a positive impact on developers’ lives. Prosper Opara, Junior Fullstack Engineer at Deimos Cloud in Nigeria, recently shared his experience with the Node.js Certification. He said that certification helped strengthen his confidence in his skills as a Node.js developer. Additionally, his team members’ trust in his expertise with Node.js has significantly increased.
Free Node.js Coding Workshop by IBM
Participants also have the opportunity to learn from experts who work on the Node.js platform and who build robust Node.js applications in the field through a free virtual coding workshop at OpenJS World sponsored by IBM, on Thursday, June 3.
OpenJS Resources
To learn more about how you could be a part of the OpenJS Foundation, click here.
About OpenJS Foundation
The OpenJS Foundation is committed to supporting the healthy growth of the JavaScript ecosystem and web technologies by providing a neutral organization to host and sustain projects, as well as collaboratively fund activities for the benefit of the community at large. The OpenJS Foundation is made up of 37 open source JavaScript projects including Appium, Dojo, jQuery, Node.js, and webpack and is supported by 30 corporate and end-user members, including GoDaddy, Google, IBM, Intel, Joyent, and Microsoft. These members recognize the interconnected nature of the JavaScript ecosystem and the importance of providing a central home for projects which represent significant shared value.
About Linux Foundation
Founded in 2000, the Linux Foundation is supported by more than 1000 members and is the world’s leading home for collaboration on open source software, open standards, and open hardware. Linux Foundation projects like Linux, Kubernetes, Node.js and more are considered critical to the development of the world’s most important infrastructure. Its development methodology leverages established best practices and addresses the needs of contributors, users and solution providers to create sustainable models for open collaboration. For more information, please visit their website.
