Real Men Do JavaScript! Programming the World in a Browser.
Dave Thomas · The Journal of Object Technology · 2008
JavaScript is the most widely used dynamic language in the world and is becoming increasingly important as an application programming language.While many hard core developers are still in denial, Web 2.0 application developers from small and large companies are developing increasingly complex applications that run close to the user.Flex is a popular and productive tool for building rich client web applications which are scripted using ActionScript, a dialect of standard ECMAScript.Increasingly RESTful protocols leverage the JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) a simple concise portable object serialization format.Rhino enables JS to be run on the server side for applications compiling JS to the JVM.There is even a version of the popular Rails framework called Jails.For the near term, JS dominance and major applications will be on the client such as GoogleApps and Thinkature.Recent announcements of more robust and significantly higher performance runtimes, including Google V8, Mozilla SpiderMonkey and TraceMonkey, Safari SquirrelFish and MS Jscript for the dynamic language run-time (DLR), are moving JavaScript far from being just a way to spiff up your web page to being both a fun and serious programming language.Google V8 is designed to support large applications such as Gmail.The MS Volta research project compiles the CLR directly to JS to allow MS CLR applications to run in any browser without requiring even the DLR.Competitors are rushing to show that they have the best performing engine.These efforts show how seriously the major players see the language as a platform for the future. JAVASCRIPT IS A REAL LANGUAGEIn JavaScript "The Wrrld's Most Misunderstood Programming Language" Doug Crockford articulates the major features of JS.In his recent book [1] he provides a balanced perspective of the good and the bad of JavaScript.JS in many ways