JavaScript

JavaScript is a scripting language most often used for client-side web development. It is a dynamic, weakly typed, prototype-based language with first-class functions. Currently, "JavaScript" is an implementation of the ECMAScript standard.

JavaScript was influenced by many languages and was designed to have a similar look to Java, but be easier for non-programmers to work with. The language is best known for its use in websites (as client-side JavaScript), but is also used to enable scripting access to objects embedded in other applications.

Despite the name, JavaScript is essentially unrelated to the Java programming language; though both have a common debt to C syntax. The language was renamed from LiveScript in a co-marketing deal between Netscape and Sun in exchange for Netscape bundling Sun's Java runtime with their browser, which was dominant at the time. The key design principles within JavaScript are inherited from the Self programming language.

"JavaScript" is a trademark of Sun Microsystems. It was used under license for technology invented and implemented by Netscape Communications and current entities such as the Mozilla Foundation.


History and naming

JavaScript was originally developed by Brendan Eich of Netscape under the name Mocha, later LiveScript, and finally renamed to JavaScript. The change of name from LiveScript to JavaScript roughly coincided with Netscape adding support for Java technology in its Netscape Navigator web browser. JavaScript was first introduced and deployed in the Netscape browser version 2.0B3 in December of 1995. The naming has caused confusion, giving the impression that the language is a spinoff of Java and has been characterized by many as a marketing ploy by Netscape to give JavaScript the cachet of what was then the hot new web-programming language.
To avoid trademark issues, Microsoft named its implementation of the language JScript. JScript was first supported in Internet Explorer version 3.0, released in August 1996 and included Y2K compliant date functions, unlike those based on java.util.Date in JavaScript at the time.

Netscape submitted JavaScript to Ecma International for standardization resulting in the standardized version named ECMAScript




Use in Web pages

The primary use of JavaScript is to write functions that are embedded in or included from HTML pages and interact with the Document Object Model (DOM) of the page. Some simple examples of this usage are:

Opening or popping up a new window with programmatic control over the size, position and 'look' of the new window (i.e. whether the menus, toolbars, etc. are visible).
Validation of web form input values to make sure that they will be accepted before they are submitted to the server.
Changing images as the mouse cursor moves over them: This effect is often used to draw the user's attention to important links displayed as graphical elements.
Because JavaScript runs on the client rather than the server, it can respond to user actions quickly, making an application feel more responsive. Furthermore, JavaScript code can detect user actions which HTML alone cannot, such as individual keystrokes. Applications such as Gmail attempt to take advantage of this: much of the user-interface logic is written in JavaScript, and JavaScript dispatches requests for information (such as the content of an e-mail message) to the server. The wider trend of Ajax programming similarly seeks to exploit JavaScript's strengths.

A JavaScript engine (also known as JavaScript interpreter or JavaScript implementation) is an interpreter that interprets JavaScriptsource code]]and executes the script accordingly. The first ever JavaScript engine was created by Brendan Eich at Netscape Communications Corporation, for the Netscape Navigator web browser. The engine, code named SpiderMonkey, is implemented in C. It has since been updated (in JavaScript 1.5) to conform to ECMA-262 Edition 3. The Rhino engine, created primarily by Norris Boyd (also at Netscape) is a JavaScript implementation in Java. Like SpiderMonkey, Rhino is ECMA-262 Edition 3 compliant.

By far, the most common host environment for JavaScript is a web browser. Web browsers typically use the public API to create "host objects" responsible for reflecting the DOM into JavaScript. The web server is another common application of the engine. A JavaScript webserver would expose host objects representing a HTTP request and response objects, which a JavaScript program could then manipulate to dynamically generate web pages.

A minimal example of a Web page containing JavaScript (using HTML 5 syntax) would be:













Security

JavaScript and the DOM provide the potential for malicious authors to deliver scripts to run on a client computer via the Web. Browser authors contain this risk using two restrictions. First, scripts run in a sandbox in which they can only perform Web-related actions, not general-purpose programming tasks like creating files. Second, scripts are constrained by the same origin policy: scripts from one Web site do not have access to information such as usernames, passwords, or cookies sent to another site. Most JavaScript-related security bugs are breaches of either the same origin policy or the sandbox.