I joined 99X Technology as an intern and as a technology enthusiast, looking for opportunities to learn new things and to make cutting edge solutions. Soon I was introduced to a new world of JavaScript where it is used not to do small website hacks and data validation, but to build full-fledged software products.

Our clients demand software solutions that are cross platform, and solutions that support all types of devices. Our realization is that web applications that are dynamic and responsive would be the ideal solution for such situations. And we believe that JavaScript has the potential to cater these situations. There are plenty of libraries that are out there to address many individual aspects of JavaScript application development. But what lacked were some kind of architecture and a set of design patterns to address common problems that JS developers are facing.

Inspired by some of the great presentations such as Nicholas Zakas’ “Scalable JavaScript Application Architecture” and with the experience of few large scale JavaScript projects at 99x, development for a reference architecture for single paged web applications with JavaScript was started. Me and two other interns at 99X, Himeshi and Asanka were lead by Hasith (a wonderful guy with a wealth of knowledge and experience), were involved in this project, which is now released as BoilerplateJS.

BoilerplateJS is a reference architecture intended to be used in large scale web applications. It combines a set of industry leading JavaScript libraries and a set of great design patterns. BoilerplateJS would be the starting code for your JavaScript project, where you can add in and remove parts according to your requirements.

Every decision and every line of code that ended up in BoilerplateJS were carefully reviewed and made in the best and the simplest possible manner. Careful thought went into making BoilerplateJS loosely coupled, and flexible.

My intention of this post was to give a sneak peek in to the development of BoilerplateJS. More information about BoilerplateJS is available on http://boilerplatejs.org/. And do have a look at Hasith’s blog post at http://blog.hasith.net/2012/08/boilerplatejs-is-out.html.