14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft's TypeScript team has announced the immediate availability of TypeScript 1.6, which comes with lots of new features, of which React.js support is the most requested by its users.
TypeScript, a JavaScript language superset which allows developers to write JavaScript code using a simpler syntax and with more advanced (programming-wise) features, has been providing built-in compatibility for lots of JavaScript frameworks, ranging from AngularJS to jQuery, and from Dojo to Aurelia.
Previously announced two weeks ago with the 1.6 Beta release, TypeScript is now officially touting its support for Facebook's React.js JavaScript framework.
"Designed with feedback from React experts and the React team, we've built full-featured support for React typing and the JSX support," said Jonathan Turner, program manager for the TypeScript team.
This was achieved by adding support for a new .tsx file extension, which developers will be able to use when wanting to intermingle React's JSX syntax with TypeScript code, without losing "all the type-checking and autocomplete capabilities of TypeScript."
Besides React, TypeScript also brings support for class expressions, user-defined type guards, intersection types, and stricter type checking for object literals.
In other JavaScript news...
But as newer projects like TypeScript, React.js, Node.js, and AngularJS are picking up speed, older ones are losing Steam. In a joint press release, the jQuery Foundation and Dojo Foundation announced they were planning to merge.
The two projects have lost some core team developers in the past years, but don't panic, because they are also very stable and don't need that much work as they once did. If this is a good thing or a bad move, we can't tell yet.
After two and a half years, the Modernizr team has announced the release of its 3.x branch. Modernizr is a JavaScript library for detecting various HTML5 and CSS3 features in Web browsers, and providing a way to mitigate unsupported versions using shim (feature emulation) scripts.
If you use ZURB's Foundation framework for creating user interfaces, ZURB has provided an introspective into their framework's upcoming 6.x branch. Not exactly JavaScript news, but Foundation is not exactly a CSS framework either.