JavaScript

Overview

JavaScript is a widely used scripting language that is used for developing websites. It is based on prototypes and dynamic language and offers first class functions. JavaScript was originally designed as the counterpart to Java and was influenced by other languages including ECMA Script Standard.

The main focus of JavaScript is to ease the work required to develop scripts for a webpage. As a result, JavaScript is appealing to novice and advanced programmers. JavaScript's key design principles were inherited from the Scheme and Shelf programming languages.

JavaScript was developed by Brendan Eich from Netscape. Microsoft later developed a variant of the language calling it Jscript, which added additional features including date methods that were Y2K friendly. JavaScript is flexible and is one of the easiest programming languages to learn. The language is popular in India, the United States of America, Ukraine, and Russia, and it is also becoming increasingly popular in many European and Asian countries.

JavaScript is an open source programming language, so it can be used, modified, and redistributed for free, provided that the basic provisions of the license are upheld.

Benefits

JavaScript is incredibly client friendly and can be used to meet specific needs. You can make changes and creates new things without sending the page back to the server. JavaScript offers a number of features like associative arrays, regular expressions, loosely typed variables, objects and classes, strings, dates, and math libraries. It allows access to W3C DOM support which makes it a beneficiary programming language. Open source JavaScript codes can handle a variety of different tasks, from displaying current time and date on a web page, to handling mouse overs, pop-up windows, pop-under windows. Apart from these, it is a programming language that can be used by people who may not even have a programming background.

How It Works

JavaScript supports all similar structured programming syntax that is found within the C programming language, including if statements, switch statements, and while loops. However, JavaScript does not support normal scoping. Instead, JavaScript is capable of supporting block level scoping using the "let" function. JavaScript includes a specific 'eval' function that is capable of executing statements provided as strings during run time. Objects are associative arrays that are augmented using prototypes and property names. Properties and their associated values can be changed, added, or deleted during run time and those associated with an object can also be enumerated in loop using a 'for' function.

Functions are objects of their own. Inner functions are defined within the scope of other functions and are created every time the outer function calls out. When a function is called specifically as a method of an object, the function's keyword is bound to the object for the span of that invocation. The run-time environment is relied upon by JavaScript in order to provide objects and methods that scripts can use for interaction. Regular expressions are used and supported by JavaScript, providing a concise syntax for manipulation of text that is much more sophisticated than string functions that are built in. A number of different parameters are capable of being passed on to a function. It can use formal parameters and the local arguments object in order to access these parameters. Both arrays and objects can be created using shortcut syntax.

Companies/Brands

Companies like Sun Microsystems and Zembly develop JavaScript.