Four Eras of JavaScript Frameworks
<p><pre><code>  &gt; JavaScript was first released in 1995. Like I mentioned
  &gt; above, I started writing JS in 2012, almost two decades
  &gt; later, near the beginning of the era I’m dubbing the
  &gt; First Frameworks.
  &gt; [...]
  &gt; This contrasted pretty significantly with mobile apps
  &gt; when they started to hit the scene. From the get go,
  &gt; mobile apps on iOS and Android were full applications
  &gt; written in Serious Languages™ like Objective C and Java.
</code></pre>
I&#x27;m going to make a small jump to conclusions and guess the author is too young to have accurate memories of what web development was like pre-2010.<p>Gmail was released in 2004, Google Maps in 2005, Google Docs in 2006. All of those used JavaScript technologies (GWT and Closure) that enabled web UIs to go head-to-head with native applications of the era. There was an entire generation of JS frameworks (maybe two?) that rose and fell before the release of the iPhone.<p>The primary difference between GWT&#x2F;Closure and what we&#x27;ve got now is that JavaScript was treated as a compilation target, not a developer platform. The tooling was all in Java or C++, there was no concept of writing a transpiler or bundler in JavaScript and no culture of standalone JS interpreters. IIRC the only option at the time for running JS on the server was Rhino (based on Netscape&#x2F;Mozilla), which for whatever reason never saw the broad adoption of Node.