The Linux Foundation Unites JavaScript Community for Open Web Development

Welcomes JS Foundation and introduces Mentorship Program

LONDON (OSCON EU) and SAN FRANCISCO – October 17, 2016 – The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit 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.

• webpack 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.

Supporting Comments

IBM

“This is an exciting time for the JavaScript community,” said Angel Diaz, IBM Vice President of Cloud Technology and Architecture. “By bringing together the community around core platform technologies and the application tier with the JS Foundation, the industry is establishing a center of gravity to drive innovation in the open through code, collaboration and community development. We’re proud to continue our long tradition of supporting open tech communities by becoming a founding member of the JS Foundation, which we believe will set the bar for openly governed JavaScript projects.

As part of this launch, we are pleased to be contributing Node-RED to the JS Foundation. Node-RED (see: http://nodered.org/) is a rapidly growing environment that has reached widespread adoption among the IoT community by establishing a broad ecosystem of flows and nodes that are shared by the community at large. With community contribution, Node-RED will set a course to innovate and iterate IoT applications rapidly and with greater agility right in the cloud.”

Samsung Electronics

“JavaScript represents huge potential beyond the web. We’ve already shown how JerryScript, a lightweight JavaScript Engine developed first by Samsung, can enable high efficiency devices across the Internet of Things such as smartwatches, other wearables and tiny things,” said Vice President Youngyoon Kim of Software R&D Center at Samsung Electronics. “We invite JavaScript developers, regardless of their background and vertical expertise, to join us in both the JavaScript and IoT ecosystems.”

As with all open source projects, technical contributions to the JS Foundation projects are welcome at any time, from anyone. To learn more about the JS Foundation, its members and its projects, please visit: https://js.foundation.

Today the JS Foundation will host a keynote at OSCON in London at 9:50 am local time. The video recording will be made available following the keynote. For more information, please visit: http://conferences.oreilly.com/oscon/open-source-eu.

About The Linux Foundation

The Linux Foundation is the organization of choice for the world’s top developers and companies to build ecosystems that accelerate open technology development and commercial adoption. Together with the worldwide open source community, it is solving the hardest technology problems by creating the largest shared technology investment in history. Founded in 2000, The Linux Foundation today provides tools, training and events to scale any open source project, which together deliver an economic impact not achievable by any one company. More information can be found at www.linuxfoundation.org.

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Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.

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