London's Node.js User Group

On February 20th the first release candidate of the 6th edition of the ECMAScript specification (ECMAScript 2015 as it is now officially known) was released. The language is rapidly stabilising and the new features are slowly but surely making their way into the existing JavaScript engines. Unfortunately, it will still be a while before we're able to write ES6 code and have it run natively in either browsers or Node and io.js. Thankfully TC39 (the group responsible for the development of the ECMAScript specification) put a lot of effort into ensuring backwards compatibility so it is possible to use a large and growing proportion of ES6 today.

This talk will look into some of the technologies and techniques that can be used to write, publish and deploy ES6 code today, without having to wait until the engines catch up. We'll explore source-to-source compilation, standard library polyfills, publishing modules written in ES6 to npm and the consumption of those modules by existing ES5 and new ES6 code.