My first web page (tragically unavailable in the Wayback Machine) was literally a single, large, sprawling index.html file at the root of my directory. I thought I was super cool because I had these thin, wide, rainbow GIF files that separated the sections of my page, divided into Hobbies, Favorite Movies, and, of course, the Under Construction section. And let’s not forget the blinking text!
Coding yesterday
Then JavaScript and CSS came along, and we were off to the races. The early days of writing JavaScript were kind of like knitting with oven mitts on. It wasn’t until jQuery came along that at least some semblance of order came to web development. jQuery gave you a modicum of control over the browser’s Document Object Model (DOM). But of course every browser had a slightly different way of dealing with the DOM.
jQuery made the UI easy, but creating applications and structuring modules and all that software engineering stuff was challenging. Pretty soon everyone was releasing a JavaScript framework for web development. There was Backbone, Knockout, Meteor, Ember, and AngularJS. Those were just the ones that gained a following. Believe me, there were a million of them. (There are still plenty.)
