The Comprehensive Perl Archive Network (CPAN) is a repository of over 250,000 software modules and accompanying documentation for 39,000 distributions, written in the Perl programming language by over 12,000 contributors. CPAN can denote either the archive network or the Perl program that acts as an interface to the network and as an automated software installer. Most software on CPAN is free and open source software.
Minification is the process of removing all unnecessary characters from the source code of interpreted programming languages or markup languages without changing its functionality. These unnecessary characters usually include white space characters, new line characters, comments, and sometimes block delimiters, which are used to add readability to the code but are not required for it to execute. Minification reduces the size of the source code, making its transmission over a network more efficient. In programmer culture, aiming at extremely minified source code is the purpose of recreational code golf competitions.
Metalink is an extensible metadata file format that describes one or more computer files available for download. It specifies files appropriate for the user's language and operating system; facilitates file verification and recovery from data corruption; and lists alternate download sources.
A JavaScript library is a library of pre-written JavaScript code that allows for easier development of JavaScript-based applications, especially for AJAX and other web-centric technologies. They can be included in a website by embedding it directly in the HTML via a script tag.
Apache CouchDB is an open-source document-oriented NoSQL database, implemented in Erlang.
Google Closure Tools is a set of tools to help developers build rich web applications with JavaScript. It was developed by Google for use in their web applications such as Gmail, Google Docs and Google Maps. As of 2023, the project had over 230K LOCs not counting the embedded Mozilla Rhino compiler.
Node.js is a cross-platform, open-source JavaScript runtime environment that can run on Windows, Linux, Unix, macOS, and more. Node.js runs on the V8 JavaScript engine, and executes JavaScript code outside a web browser.
npm is a package manager for the JavaScript programming language maintained by npm, Inc. npm is the default package manager for the JavaScript runtime environment Node.js and is included as a recommended feature in the Node.js installer.
Amber Smalltalk, formerly named Jtalk, is an implementation of the programming language Smalltalk-80, that runs on the JavaScript runtime of a web browser. It is designed to enable client-side development using Smalltalk. The programming environment in Amber is named Helios.
gulp is an open-source JavaScript toolkit, used as a streaming build system in front-end web development.
Grunt is a JavaScript task runner, a tool used to automatically perform frequent tasks such as minification, compilation, unit testing, and linting. It uses a command-line interface to run custom tasks defined in a file. Grunt was created by Ben Alman and is written in Node.js. It is distributed via npm. As of October 2022, there were more than 6,000 plugins available in the Grunt ecosystem.
Yarn is one of the main JavaScript package managers, developed in 2016 by Sebastian McKenzie of Meta for the Node.js JavaScript runtime environment. An alternative to the npm package manager, Yarn was created as a collaboration of Facebook, Exponent, Google, and Tilde to solve consistency, security, and performance problems with large codebases.
Deno is a runtime for JavaScript, TypeScript, and WebAssembly that is based on the V8 JavaScript engine and the Rust programming language. Deno was co-created by Ryan Dahl, who also created Node.js.
AssemblyScript is a TypeScript-based programming language that is optimized for, and statically compiled to, WebAssembly. Resembling ECMAScript and JavaScript, but with static types, the language is developed by the AssemblyScript Project with contributions from the AssemblyScript community.
npm, Inc., is a company founded in 2014. It was acquired by GitHub, a subsidiary of Microsoft, in 2020. The company maintains the npm package manager for Node.js and the npm Registry, which hosts software packages and version control based on Git.
peacenotwar is a piece of malware/Protestware created by Brandon Nozaki Miller. In March 2022, it was added as a dependency in an update for node-ipc, a common JavaScript dependency.
