JavaScript

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JavaScript

• William Hosbein

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JavaScript Early Days

• 1995. Netscape Navigator incorporated Java into
  its browser.
• Enter Brendan Eich. Netscape hired Eich and gave
  him the task to make Navigators Java support
  more accessible to non-Java programmers/developers
  .
• Eich decided that a loosely-typed scripting
  language would suit the audience and environment.
• His target audience was a few thousand web
  designers and developers who needed to use page
  elements, such as forms, frames, or images,
  without a compiler or knowledge of OOP.

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JavaScript Early Problems

• Initially called LiveScript, JavaScript was
  soon renamed in an apparent marketing mistake.
  This caused much confusion for developers because
  both names were being tossed around in the
  development community.
• By intention, JavaScript was very simple. This
  did create a problem though.
• The fact that there was no compiler and that
  copying pasting code from/to web pages was very
  easy caused many to view JavaScript as a toy.
• JavaScript also lacked an IDE and a reliable
  cross-platform debugger. This, combined with a
  few security flaws and several books aimed at
  non-programmers, caused many to view it as
  simple, completely overshadowing its potential.

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JavaScript Early Successes?

• Amongst its problems, JavaScript did gain
  popularity.
• Although not its main intention, the biggest use
  of JavaScript, early on, was controlling images
  and document contents.
• Surprisingly, the main use of JavaScript was the
  switching of images in response to mouse events.
• Navigators implementation of JavaScript which
  allowed for this image swapping was something
  that IE lacked.
• Developers actually started to only check for
  Navigator in their scripts, ignoring IE as a lost
  cause.
• Ignoring IE all together for developing created
  another bump in the road for a true
  cross-platform standards-driven Web.

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JavaScript Moving On

• Issues during the browser wars affected a
  standards-driven Web. Thus, compatibility
  problems with JavaScript were rampant from
  browser to browser.
• It was decided that JavaScript be handed over to
  an international standards body called the ECMA
  to take the development away from competing
  browser developers.
• JavaScript was even officially renamed to
  ECMAScript or ECMA-262, but its still widely
  referred to as JavaScript.

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JavaScript Now

• JavaScripts dependence on context-specific
  object models is both the strength and weakness
  in its implementation.
• Unlike other languages, JavaScripts capabilities
  cant be extended or overridden by developers.
  This leaves them dependent on the unpredictable
  software vendors.
• Despite these drawbacks, JavaScript is the most
  popular and widely used language on the net.

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JavaScript Cons

• Inability to hide source
• Example Obstacle for developers who wish to
  protect their code as intellectual property.
• Lack of an IDE, debugger, and other development
  tools
• Example Some WYSISYG development tools with
  excellent cross-browser libraries have been hurt
  by Mozillas abandonment of the old Netscape
  document.layers object model.

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JavaScript Pros

• Features from Perl
• associative arrays
• loosely typed variables
• regular expressions
• Features from C/C and Java
• clean, block-parsed syntax, objects and classes
• highly evolved date, math, and string libraries

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The End!!!

• Well, of the history part, youre not rid of me
  yet