The list of solidified ES6 features keeps growing and client side engineers just get greener with envy. Many of these new features won’t be supported in a broad base of browsers for years to come, but there is hope for us nonetheless. While we don’t have the ease of flipping a command line flag, like node, to bask in the warm sunlight of ES6 sugar, I’ve pieced together a system that gives us the best that we can hope for.
Using a combination of shims and transpilers, we can enjoy these new language features while still maintaining support for all of the browsers you’d need. I’ll first explain some of the great new additions to the javascript programming language and example use cases with code that take advantage of ES6’s elegance for client side development. I will go through the details of setting up a development environment with source maps for debugging the code that you wrote, rather than what is generated by a transpiler. Then I will discuss setting up a production build system to generate code for non-ES6 browsers.
After listening to this talk, I hope your jealousy will be soothed, and I know that your curiosity will be satisfied.