The Patterns and Practices team at Microsoft has been working for several years on publishing guidance on how to use JavaScript to interact with SharePoint and Office 365. They have come out with recommendations for replacing old server side farm solutions with pure JavaScript solutions as required as developers transition to Office 365.
The team has just released a new client side library that wraps the SharePoint REST API with a modern JavaScript API layer using TypeScript. The goal of the library is simplify common developer scenarios and support typical JavaScript constructs such as promises, functions, etc.
Compared to using the raw REST layer and parsing through the complex JSON structures provided by Office 365, this should help simplify the development interaction with the underlying API.
