The Linux Foundation, the non-profit advancing professional open source management for mass collaboration, today is announcing that JS Foundation is now a Linux Foundation Project. The JS Foundation is committed to help JavaScript application and server-side projects cultivate best practices and policies that promote high-quality standards and broad, diverse contributions for long-term sustainability.
Today the JS Foundation touts a new open, technical governance structure and also announces a Mentorship Program to help encourage a culture of collaboration and sustainability throughout the JavaScript community. Initial projects being welcomed into the mentorship program include: Appium, Interledger.js, JerryScript, Mocha, Moment.js, Node-RED and webpack.
The JS Foundation is a member supported organization; founding members include Bocoup, IBM, Ripple, Samsung, Sauce Labs, Sense Tecnic Systems, SitePen, StackPath, University of Westminster and WebsiteSetup.
Developers rely on a growing portfolio of open source technologies to create, test and deploy critical applications. By creating a center of gravity for the open source JavaScript ecosystem, the JS Foundation aims to drive broad adoption and ongoing development of key JavaScript solutions and related technologies and to facilitate collaboration within the JavaScript development community to ensure those projects maintain the quality and diverse contribution bases that provide for long-term sustainability.
“The JS Foundation aims to support a vast array of technologies that complement projects throughout the entire JavaScript ecosystem,” said Kris Borchers, executive director, JS Foundation. “JavaScript is a pervasive technology, blurring the boundaries between server, client, cloud and IoT. We welcome any projects, organizations or developers looking to help bolster the JavaScript community and inspire the next wave of growth for application development.”
The JS Foundation is focused on mentoring projects across the entire JavaScript spectrum: client and server side application libraries; mobile application testing frameworks; JavaScript engines; and technologies pushing the boundaries of the JavaScript ecosystem. As a new Linux Foundation Project, JS Foundation and its projects remain community-driven and supported, while benefiting from guidance on quality, open governance and healthy community development practices.
More about initial projects within the JS Foundation Mentorship Program:
- Appium, contributed by Sauce Labs, is an open source Node.js server used for automating native, mobile web, and hybrid applications on iOS and Android platforms as well as the recent addition of the Universal Windows Platform. Appium expands JS Foundation’s current test framework and tooling offerings into the device automation space.
- Interledger.js, contributed by Ripple, enables instant payments and micropayments in any currency, across many payment networks using the Interledger Protocol (ILP). By supporting this project, the JS Foundation is encouraging organizations and their application developers to consider new ways to think about payments on the web and look for ways to simplify and standardize those processes.
- JerryScript, contributed by Samsung, is a lightweight, fully-featured JavaScript engine for Internet of Things (IoT) devices that ships in commercial products today. As IoT is one of the largest and fastest growing sectors of the JavaScript ecosystem, JerryScript is just the beginning of JS Foundation’s efforts to support projects and developers within the IoT ecosystem.
- Mocha is a feature-rich JavaScript testing framework providing a command-line interface for Node.js as well as in-browser testing capabilities. Focused on supporting the entire JavaScript ecosystem, the JS Foundation brings Mocha under its mentorship alongside Lodash to ensure that many JavaScript application cornerstones will be available and supported long into the future.
- Moment.js is a lightweight JavaScript date library for parsing, validating, manipulating, and formatting dates and also provides time zone support to JavaScript through Moment Timezone. Another cornerstone of the JavaScript ecosystem, Moment.js helps empower developers to build amazing JavaScript applications. By supporting Moment.js alongside projects like Globalize and Jed, the JS Foundation hopes to foster collaboration for internationalization and formatting.
- Node-RED, contributed by IBM, is a flow-based programming environment built on Node.js – commonly used in the IoT space – and aimed at creating event-driven applications that can easily integrate APIs and services. Node-RED will be a major factor in the JS Foundation’s efforts to support the full end-to-end JavaScript ecosystem.
- web pack is a bundler for modules and is primarily used to bundle JavaScript files for usage in a browser. It is also capable of transforming, bundling, or packaging just about any resource or asset.
For information about all of the projects hosted by the JS Foundation, please visit http://js.foundation/projects/.
The JS Foundation’s open, technical governance model includes a Technical Advisory Committee (TAC) and a Governing Board. The TAC provides technical advice to the projects and informs the Board about technical opportunities it sees in the JavaScript ecosystem. A Board of Directors guides business decisions and marketing, ensuring alignment between the technical communities and members.
JS Foundation will also build upon its work with standards bodies, such as W3C, WHATWG, and ECMA TC39, to nurture the open standards that browser vendors and developers rely upon. By working closely with the Node.js Foundation, the JS Foundation shows a shared commitment to ensuring the sustainability and longevity of projects in the JavaScript ecosystem.