JavaScript

JavaScript was the language of the month in December 1997.

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About the language

JavaScript is an interpreted object oriented language built for the Internet by Netscape. JavaScript is now becoming an ECAM (the European standards consortium) standard. JavaScript is widely used to add some intellingence to static HTML pages. A JavaScript program can be directly incorporated in an HTML document. It can be used to animate a Web page or form validation. A JavaScript program included in an HTML document will be interpreded on the client side by a JavaScript enabled browser like Netscape Navigator or Microsoft Internet Explorer. On the client side, JavaScript acts as a glue between different elements of a Web page like HTML, Java applets and plug-ins. JavaScript can also be used on the server side to build Web pages on-the-fly. To do so, you need to have a JavaScript enabled Web server like Netscape Enterprise Server.

What I think of the language

JavaScript is great language on the client side. If a client is using a JavaScript enabled browser (which is nearly always the case nowadays) you can build really interesting applications for him. I think that with the use of JavaScript on the client-side and an other scripting language on the server side, you can build great applications. With this model you can easily write data access applications which were built "in the past" using proprietary RADs like VisualBasic or PowerBuilder. I am convinced JavaScript is nowadays the right scripting language on the client side. However, if you want to use the same language on the server side, you'll have to buy a Netscape Enterprise Server of a Microsoft Internet Information Server (the latter supporting JScript). You can achieve the same thing (or even better) using an Apache Web server and the excellent Professionnal Home Pages server side scripting language

Projets involving JavaScript

JavaScript is widely used on the Internet. In fact it is used much more than Java. Actually you can build JavaScript applications using only a Web browser and a text editor. You'll find extensive documentation about JavaScript on the excellent Netscape DeveEdge Online site. You'll also find there interesting JavaScript sample code. I used myself JavaScript on several Web pages. JavaScript is commonly used to build mouse-sensitive buttons. You can see this effect on my home page. I also used JavaScript to build a very simple yet useful image browser called SlideViewer. I also used JavaScript on the Microclub site to build dynamically a news lists (this works only with Netscape 4). If you are interested in JavaScript development, I can also point you to Netscape Visual JavaScript and Netscape JavaScript Debugger.

For comments, additions, corrections, gripes, kudos, etc. please send e-mail to avernet@di.epfl.ch. Copyright © 1995, 1996, 1997 by Alessandro Vernet. All Rights Reserved.