JavaScript creator and current CTO of Mozilla Corporation Brendan Eich provides a detailed history of JavaScript, including some of the more interesting programs written with JavaScript, right up to how JavaScript has been essential to the Ajax or Web 2.0 revolution.
Eich started work on JS in 1995 and says he's been surprised by how popular it has been: "I was resigned for a long time to JS being unpopular due to those annoying popups, but more: due to its unconventional combination of functional and prototype-based object programming traditions."
And with multicore/massively-parallel computers upon us, Eich talks about the future of JavaScript: "JS has its role to play in addressing the multicore world, starting with relatively simple extensions such as Google Gears' worker pools -- "shared nothing" background threads with which browser JS communicates by sending and receiving messages."
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Member since:
2007-04-03
Member since:
2006-12-19
Member since:2005-07-06
So use a toolkit like Dojo to abstract out the IE vs. Rest-Of-The-World issues.
Member since:2006-02-05
Member since:2005-07-06
Member since:
2006-02-05
IMO one of javascripts big problem is its name. Its called java, it looks like java, but it is a dynamic, not a strongly typed language. If you treat it as a strongly typed language, it is going to be hell to work with. If you treat it as a dynamic language, it is actually incredibly powerful and expressive.
Member since:2005-07-06
I also think that it doesn't help that Javascript is often used for tasks that are better-suited to server-side scripting languages. If I just need to run a search-replace on a text string, or truncate a string to a specific number of characters, I'll use Javascript (of course, if users need to be able to dynamically expand/collapse the truncated string without a page reload, then I'll use JS).
Member since:2006-02-05
http://280slides.com/
http://www.sproutcore.com/
We are seeing some seriously impressive stuff being done on the front end. sproutcore actually has a data layer that can hook into either stuff like google gears, or a web service for persistence.
Member since:
2008-05-30
Member since:
2006-12-19
I agree with the comments about using a compatibility library to smooth the differences between the browsers, personally I use Prototype, but others mentioned are at least as good.
There's so much more to javascript, though. Take property getters and setters as an example:
http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Core_JavaScript_1.5_Guide:Crea...
Really, really cool stuff, contrast this to exploder, where they haven't even bothered to implement constants! (i.e. the const keyword - in IE6 at least)
