10 Years of Best of JS

Creator of Best of JS and JS Rising Stars projects.

The story behind the project, its mission to curate the best of the JavaScript ecosystem, and how it has adapted to the ever-changing landscape. We’ll also explore the key trends, tools, and technologies that have shaped JavaScript over the past decade.

This talk has been presented at JSNation 2025, check out the latest edition of this JavaScript Conference.

FAQ

Best of JS is a curated list of JavaScript projects aimed at helping developers discover trends, libraries, and track project growth. It also helps users find new projects classified under meaningful tags and quickly access documentation.

Best of JS uses the evolution of GitHub stars to determine project relevance. Projects that do not gain stars over a certain period are considered less maintained or relevant, and may be removed.

JavaScript Rising Stars is a sister project to Best of JS, running for nine years. It takes annual snapshots of Best of JS data, enhanced with commentary from experts, highlighting popular projects.

TypeScript became significant due to its adoption by major frameworks like Angular in 2014, leading it to become the de facto standard for writing JavaScript, supported by new runtimes and tools.

SPAs are web applications enabled by AJAX that allow fast navigation between pages without full reloads, using the browser's history API to communicate with the backend via JSON APIs.

Tailwind CSS is the current standard, utilizing atomic CSS where styles are written directly in HTML attributes, providing a scalable, consistent design system with great developer experience.

Headless components are unstyled components with built-in accessibility, allowing developers to style them independently while providing essential features like keyboard shortcuts for disabled users.

JavaScript tooling has evolved from being written in JavaScript to incorporating tools written in Go and Rust, such as ESBuild, Vite, and Beom for faster performance and better efficiency.

SPAs can face performance issues with large bundle sizes, SEO challenges due to JavaScript-generated content, and require synchronization with backend teams to prevent API version conflicts.

Tags in Best of JS help classify projects under meaningful categories, making it easier for users to find relevant projects and ensuring that outdated or deprecated projects are filtered out.

javascript

Michael Rambeau

28 min

16 Jun, 2025

Comments

Video Summary and Transcription

Michael discusses the evolution of JavaScript from its early days to modern server-side capabilities, the impact of jQuery, Node.js, and single-page applications with popular libraries like Backbone and AngularJS. The emergence of UI libraries like React, Vue.js, and Angular, alongside meta frameworks like Next.js, Remix, Veltkit, and Solid with server components. The Best of JS project tracks JavaScript project trends, filters out deprecated projects, and monitors GitHub stars for maintenance. The importance of maintaining project relevance, adding new projects continuously, and classifying projects under meaningful tags. The evolution of TypeScript, tool releases like Deno and Burn, styling evolution from CSS to headless components, and the impact of Tailwind CSS. Analysis of CSS optimization, CLI ecosystem, tooling trends, emerging tools, and JavaScript development trends over the past decade.

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