OSNews: http://www.osnews.com/story/20131/The_A-Z_of_Programming_Languages_JavaScript Exploring the Future of Computing en-us Copyright 2001-2009, David Adams adam+nospam@osnews.com Mon, 06 Jul 2009 21:36:08 GMT http://www.osnews.com/images/osnews.gif OSNews.com http://www.osnews.com Weakest in the Series so far http://osnews.com/thread?325164 http://osnews.com/thread?325164 Previous articles in this series have been great, there's lots of interesting information about the history and development of the different languages while this one seems lacking. Thu, 31 Jul 2008 16:56:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (tux2005) Comments Exploder! http://osnews.com/thread?325176 http://osnews.com/thread?325176 I really like javascript as a language. The biggest problem, though, is Internet Exploder, whose implementation of Javascript is unspeakably poor, and really spoils it for me.
Of course, that's probably what Microsoft intended.... Thu, 31 Jul 2008 18:33:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (robinh) Comments RE: Exploder! http://osnews.com/thread?325179 http://osnews.com/thread?325179
I really like javascript as a language. The biggest problem, though, is Internet Exploder, whose implementation of Javascript is unspeakably poor, and really spoils it for me. Of course, that's probably what Microsoft intended....


So use a toolkit like Dojo to abstract out the IE vs. Rest-Of-The-World issues. Thu, 31 Jul 2008 18:43:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (fretinator) Comments Gets a bad rep http://osnews.com/thread?325181 http://osnews.com/thread?325181 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. Thu, 31 Jul 2008 19:11:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (google_ninja) Comments RE[2]: Exploder! http://osnews.com/thread?325182 http://osnews.com/thread?325182 dude, jquery all the way. css selectors + implementation abstraction + javascript = awsome Thu, 31 Jul 2008 19:12:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (google_ninja) Comments Actually - its a nice article http://osnews.com/thread?325183 http://osnews.com/thread?325183 But not because of a lot of news, but I enjoyed getting to know the guy behind one of the most exposed, underrated, overrated and disputed programming languages. Thu, 31 Jul 2008 19:25:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (kstrieder) Comments RE[2]: Exploder! http://osnews.com/thread?325186 http://osnews.com/thread?325186 Its more than the differences. Javascript in IE is slow like up to 10 times slower the Gecko / Webkit. It is also prone to memory leaks in AJAX style web apps. Thu, 31 Jul 2008 19:36:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (andrewg) Comments Browser compat libs http://osnews.com/thread?325194 http://osnews.com/thread?325194 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) Thu, 31 Jul 2008 21:50:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (robinh) Comments RE: Gets a bad rep http://osnews.com/thread?325199 http://osnews.com/thread?325199 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). Thu, 31 Jul 2008 22:22:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (StephenBeDoper) Comments RE[2]: Gets a bad rep http://osnews.com/thread?325225 http://osnews.com/thread?325225 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. Fri, 01 Aug 2008 00:27:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (google_ninja) Comments JavaFX? http://osnews.com/thread?325243 http://osnews.com/thread?325243 I would like an article about JavaFX. It seems like an interesting language, and the first release will come right now. Fri, 01 Aug 2008 05:43:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Kebabbert) Comments