5 Best JavaScript Style Guides
Airbnb, JavaScript Standard Style, Google Style Guide, and More
One developer may write code differently compared to another. This is all fine as long as everyone works on their own code. But what happens when 10,100 or even 1000 developers work on the same codebase? Then, things can get really messier!
This is where style guides come in handy. A standard style guide is a set of standards that outline how should write code, formatted, and organized.
Using a standard style guide ensures that code is shared easily among developers. As a result, any new developer can get up to speed with a given piece of code within no time and then write code that other developers can understand quickly and easily!
As time passes, the codebase becomes more extensive, and maintaining a consistent coding style becomes harder. Therefore, even though you’re the only developer on a project, adopting a style guide has a considerable impact. There are several style guides available there, and in this article, I’ll introduce 5 JavaScript style guides that will help you improve your coding standards.
1. Airbnb Style Guide
Since its release back in 2012, Airbnb JavaScript Style Guide has gained popularity, and at present, it is probably the most commonly used and most relevant style guide for many developers. Airbnb introduces it as the “Most reasonable approach to JavaScript.”
The beauty of the Airbnb style guide is it covers nearly every aspect of JavaScript coding, from objects to testing to performance.
Although it is strict, the Airbnb JavaScript style guide is quite intuitive, and many rules actually make sense. In addition, all the rules there help you to maintain a consistent coding style.
Developers love Airbnb JavaScript Style mainly because of 4 reasons:
- Consistency
- Readability
- Predictability
- Efficiency
Currently, the Airbnb style guide is usually used in many startup companies and companies using modern frameworks like React.
You can check out the complete guide to Airbnb JavaScript style guide from here:
2. JavaScript Standard Style
JavaScript Standard Style is a style guide with a linter and an automatic code fixer, founded and released as an open-source under MIT license by Feross Abukhadijeh.
The best thing about the JavaScript Standard Style is that it’s simple. You don’t need to maintain multiple hundred-line style configuration files for every module/project you work on.
There are three main reasons why you should consider using the JavaScript Standard Style:
- No configuration: The easiest way to maintain consistent style in your project.
- Automatically format code: You only need to run standard — fix, and the style guide will take care of your messy or inconsistent code.
- Catch style issues and programmer errors early: You can prevent back and forth between contributor and reviewer and save valuable code review time.
Using JavaScript Standard Style is very simple. You can type the JavaScript code in your way and run it via the standard node package. Poof! Your code is formatted automatically.
JavaScript Standard Style uses by many tech companies, including node JS, NPM, GitHub, Heroku, and GoDaddy.
Fork it, make changes if required, commit and use it in your next project, or use it as the foundation to build one for your organization. You can check out the complete guide to JavaScript Standard Style from here:
3. Idiomatic JavaScript Style Guide
“All code in any code base should look like a single person typed it, no matter how many people contributed.”
Idiomatic JavaScript is another one of the most popular JavaScript style guides. This has been around for years, and when you look through it, you’ll notice that it consists of many rules to enforce your code style consistency, readability, and maintainability.
Idiomatic JavaScript is developed by some of the most experienced JavaScript developers out there. It is one of the oldest and most comprehensive Javascript coding standards available for use as open source.
As far as I know, there are no linting tools available to incorporate this into your development flow, but it is definitely worth looking through it and seeing how the rules would apply to the code you’re writing.
Need to commit some code to help make Idiomatic JavaScript better? Please read up on their style guide and learn how their JavaScript is formatted. You can view the Idiomatic JavaScript guide from here:
4. Google Style Guide
Google is no stranger to open source, and every major open-source project has its own style guide to make it much easier to understand the large codebase. Google JavaScript Style Guide was released in 2012, and many of Google’s open-source JavaScript designs are already following this style guide.
This is probably not one of the most common style guides available, but it’s pretty apparent that it got a pretty significant adoption within Google itself.
However, it has got nicely laid out set of rules to follow, and there is an accompanying ESLint package that you can use to incorporate the style guide into your project.
The Google style guide can be divided into two parts, focusing on JavaScript style rules (aesthetic issues of formatting) and concentrate solely on conventions and coding standards. You can view the Google Style Guide from here:
5. jQuery JavaScript Style Guide
JQuery developers who write JavaScript follow the jquery JavaScript Style Guide for many years now. Therefore, jQuery developers can integrate this module and check whether their code is written according to the standard jQuery style guide.
There are hundreds of jQuery modules and projects that follow the jQuery core JavaScript style guidelines. You can view the complete guide from here:
Conclusion
Imagine you’re working in a large team with other developers. Everyone’s going to have their own style of how they write a particular part of a code.
There’s may not be a problem in either of their approaches, but if you’ve got different developers writing code differently, your codebase will start to look a little bit unreadable. Also, new developers coming into the team won’t necessarily know which best approach to use.
This is where style guides come in. A style guide is a set of rules that developers follow when writing their code to ensure consistency between developers. This article discussed 5 JavaScript Style Guides you can use to maintain a consistent code style.
Let me know what’s your favorite JavaScript Style Guide in the comment section. Thank you for reading!
