What is JavaScript

JavaScript, often abbreviated JS, is a programming language that is one of the core technologies of the World Wide Web. As of 2022, 98% of websites use JavaScript on the client side for web page behavior, often incorporating third-party libraries.

Contents

1. Introduction to JavaScript
2. History of JavaScript
3. Client-Side vs. Server-Side JavaScript
4. Advantages of JavaScript

Introduction to JavaScript

JavaScript is an event-driven client-side scripting language that can be embedded into HTML to dynamically control and update web pages. It is used extensively by web developers to provide dynamic content, such as navigation menus and auto-updating user interfaces. It has become one of the most important technologies for building websites and web applications.

JavaScript mainly consists of the following:

1. ECMAScript provides the core functionality. It defines functions, objects and classes, which are used to create applications that can be easily understood by developers who need to write scripts that interact with the browser.

2. The Document Object Model (DOM) provides interfaces for interacting with elements on web pages. This includes properties and methods for accessing data from an element's attributes as well as its children. The DOM also provides interfaces for manipulating elements or adding them to an HTML document so that they can be interacted with by JavaScript code.

3. The Browser Object Model (BOM) provides the browser API for interacting with the web browser. This includes events such as click, focus and blur as well as methods such as getElementById(name) which can be used to retrieve information about an element in a document by name or id property.

JavaScript allows you to create interactive web pages. HTML and CSS are used to build the web page, but JavaScript can enhance web pages with a wide variety of interactive elements, such as maps and charts. This makes for a more engaging experience for the user, who does not have to continually reload the page from the server in order to see different updates.

JavaScript code modifies a web page's content as it is displayed (dynamically) to the user. It can run before or after other files have loaded in order to update what users see on the screen or do specific actions.

It has become one of the most commonly used programming languages, and it can run on both client-side and server-side.

History of JavaScript

JavaScript was invented by Brendan Eich in 1995 as a prototype for his new language, which he called LiveScript. The name "JavaScript" was coined by Netscape's JavaScript team as a pun on Java's name.

It was originally built as a prototype for an upcoming web browser that would work with Netscape's Java virtual machine. It quickly became clear that the language was too complex to be used in this manner, but it did have some potential as a general-purpose scripting language.

In 1994, Brendan Eich created the first version of JavaScript at Netscape, who named it LiveScript (then later "LiveScript and ECMAScript"). The language had no classes or objects, but it did support functions and variables. JavaScript 1.0 added object-oriented programming capabilities to the language with the addition of prototypes and class definitions.

The first complete implementation of JavaScript 1.0 was released in 1995 by Netscape (then named "Netscape Navigator"). It shipped in beta form with Netscape Navigator 3.0 and had been tested in earlier versions of the browser. The final version of JavaScript 1.0 included support for event handlers, which allowed scripts to react to user interactions like clicks or keystrokes within documents or web pages.

Netscape Navigator 3.0 introduced JavaScript 1.1, released in August 1995 by Netscape Communications. Meanwhile, Microsoft released Internet Explorer 3 and its own implementation of JavaScript called JScript 2.0, which competed with Netscape's release of JavaScript 1.1. However, Microsoft used the name JScript to avoid possible licensing issues with Netscape.

JavaScript had no standards governing syntax or features at that time. In 1997, TC39—the committee responsible for the standardization of JavaScript—proposed ECMA-262 as a proposal for a new standard for the language. ECMA-262 was adopted by ISO/IEC, which assigned TC39 to make ECMAScript a general-purpose cross-platform and vendor-neutral script language.

Client-Side vs. Server-Side JavaScript

Client-Side JavaScript script runs in a web browser and can be used to create dynamic content. The term client-side scripting means that it runs at the client machine inside the web browser, but one important thing to remember is that client's web browser also needs to support JavaScript or it must be JavaScript enabled.

Most modern browsers support JavaScript, and they have their own JavaScript engines (Google Chrome has its own V8 engine).

Server-Side JavaScript runs on the server instead of a web browser. The JavaScript code on the server is not visible to the client. It allows you to access databases, file systems, etc. The most popular server-side JavaScript language is Node.js, which is a JavaScript runtime environment that runs on a server.

Before the introduction of Node.js in 2009, JavaScript was recognized only as a frontend client-side scripting language and was only used to manage aspects of a web application visible to the user. Node.js on the other side became a game-changer.

It allowed developers to use JavaScript as a server-side language, effectively transforming JavaScript from a frontend only technology to a full-stack technology because of which it became the most popular choice of web developers. One can now create a full-stack web application using JavaScript alone.

Advantages of JavaScript

• JavaScript is a very powerful language when it comes to modern web development. It gives web developers the power to do things that were not possible before.

• JavaScript allows you to build completely dynamic websites, and can make your website extremely interactive.

• You can easily manipulate DOM with vanilla JS or libraries like jQuery, etc. With client side technology like Vue, React and Angular, it has become super easy to create SPAs (Single Page Applications) that use JavaScript under the hood.

Summary

In this tutorial, we have learnt about the JavaScript programming language. We have also learnt about the history of JavaScript, what the client-side and server-side JavaScript are, and some of the advantages of JavaScript.

Please checkout our related content section below for more tutorials on similar topics.

We hope that you have learnt something from our tutorials. Please feel free to share this content with your friends.

If you have any questions or want some other content to be added to our website so that it can help you learn and grow further, please do not hesitate to contact us at info@createmysite.org. We would love to hear from you.

We are hiring!! If you are tech blogger who loves writing content on modern technologies, we would love to get in touch with you. Just drop us a mail at the email address mentioned above and we will reach out to you as soon as possible.

If you are interested in learning more about our website, please visit our about page.