14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft has released the first beta for TypeScript 1.6, and it comes with lots of improvements, of which React.js support is the biggest.
TypeScript, the JavaScript superset developed by Microsoft, has been seeing more and more adoption lately, with AngularJS developer confessing they use it to build the framework's upcoming 2.x version.
As Microsoft developers have stated, "While we’ve worked with teams such as Dojo, Aurelia, and Angular to ensure using TypeScript is as easy as using JavaScript, there was still an important library that that presented a difficulty for TypeScript developers: React."
Starting with TypeScript 1.6 Beta, JavaScript developers will be able to use Facebook's React framework together with TypeScript in their projects, all thanks to a new .tsx file extension.
Microsoft devs added this extension specifically to support React's JSX's XML-like syntax, and it will enable TypeScript developers to load JSX code inside TypeScript projects.
In other JavaScript news...
Since we've brought up Facebook, the company's developers recently open sourced Relay, a JavaScript framework for building data-driven React applications, may they be small or large.
If you haven't heard, for Bootstrap's most recent 4.x Alpha its developers have rewritten all its JS parts to conform to the new ES6 JavaScript specification.
Ghost, the blogging platform written in Node.js, has announced it managed to pass the $500,000 / €445,000 mark when it came to revenue this year, quite an impressive task for a company with only 7 employees.
Due to the rise of Windows usage among JavaScript developers, npm has announced they will be having weekly meetings with Microsoft's Visual Studio team.
Meteor, the most advanced full-stack framework for JavaScript development have announced plans to support PostgreSQL as a default database for Meteor apps. Until know, this distinction was reserved for MongoDB only.
Additionally, the Meteor team also launched Meteor Galaxy, a commercial service for running and managing Meteor applications in the cloud. The service is currently in its first stages of implementations, but developers can sign up for early access.