Brief History of JavaScript
- 1. Brief History of JavaScript An introduction to properly distinct JavaScript, ECMAScript, Node.js and some other buzzwords
- 2. Genesis ● Created by Brendan Eich (founder of Mozilla) to be run natively on Netscape browser in 1995 ● The goal is to turn static HTML page to be more dynamic ● Originally called “LiveScript”, only to be renamed later to “JavaScript” because anything with name “Java” in it was so cool in 90’s
- 3. The Browser War ● Microsoft then adopted stole the technology to be implemented on its own glorious browser: Internet Explorer ● The implementation got really different from the Netscape’s, frustrating web developers to make a single working website for all browsers ● This made birth to terms like “best viewed in Internet Explorer”
- 4. Standardization ● Netscape submitted the JavaScript language to ECMA International to make a standardized version based on their implementation ● Thus born the term “ECMAScript” to identify the specification of the language ● Other companies later made implementation based on this spec, like Macromedia with their “ActionScript”, and of course Microsoft with their… “JScript”
- 5. ● This standardization only unified the web for a few years before companies started to fight over which implementation that should be prioritized ● Guess which company started the fight? ● Of course it’s Microsoft The Browser War cont.
- 6. The Renaissance Era ● Despite the browser war, JavaScript community was flourishing, and they gave way to libraries like jQuery, Prototype, and MooTools to ease development of cross-browser features ● Also in this era, the term AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript XML) was coined to describe techniques to allow JavaScript to fetch data from server without reloading the whole document ● The implementation of AJAX was also messy and unstandardized, with some browsers using XMLHttpRequest and others with ActiveX. But thanks to libraries above, this didn’t bother web developers anymore
- 7. The Harmony ● As the war of “mY JavAScRipt iS BetTEr” was no longer relevant, the companies started to regroup again and finally released specification of ECMAScript 5, which codenamed as “Harmony” ● This led to a smoother development of JavaScript, with the release of the infamous ECMAScript 6, a.k.a. ES6 ● ES6 is now renamed as ES2015, where subsequent version is ES2016 & ES2017
- 8. Common Ground ● In 2009, the effort to make specification for JavaScript to be run outside browser was started, resulting in “CommonJS” (originally called “ServerJS”) ● The most popular implementation is, of course, Node.js ● The popular yet less known implementation is: MongoDB ● Node.js is built using V8, the JavaScript engine that is originally made for Google Chrome browser
- 9. Bonus Chapter: The Node War ● Node.js was founded by Ryan Dahl in 2009 when working on a company called Joyent ● Joyent later took the governance of Node development, but this made the development less open to community ● So the community took a “People Power” in 2014 by forking Node to io.js and develop their own features based on latest version of V8 engine ● Thankfully in 2015 the war is ended by the foundation of Node.js Foundation which oversee the release of Node v4, codenamed as, you know it: “Harmony”
- 10. The Typings ● Being a dynamic language, some people thought what if JavaScript is statically typed. This led to the creation of TypeScript, a superset of JavaScript ● Essentially, TypeScript make JavaScript to be more Java, with features like types (duh), annotations, generics and interfaces ● To run a TypeScript code, it must be compiled into JavaScript first, which will strip those additional features ● Guess who created TypeScript? ● Surprise, surprise, it’s Microsoft
- 11. Summary/Glossary ● JavaScript is the original language to be run in browsers ● LiveScript is the original name ● ECMAScript is the specification of the language ● ActionScript, JScript is example of other languages implementing the spec ● TypeScript is the static superset of the language ● CommonJS is the specification for out-of-browser JavaScript ● Node.js is the most popular server side JavaScript, implementing CommonJS
- 12. First World Problem ● Despite smooth release of ECMAScript specifications, the real implementations of the features are not equal in every browsers ● Also in server-side Node.js, the implementation of a single ES spec is spread into multiple versions ● This brings new headache for developers: “In which ES version should we write our applications?” ● The safest bet of course the lowest version, which is more widely adopted, but the developer experience definitely is the worst
- 13. The Tower of Babel ● The solution: a “transpiler”, which is like a compiler of a language, but resulting in same language ● Babel is the most known transpiler for JavaScript, allowing you to write the app in latest spec, ES2017 for example, then transpile it to ES5 ● Named from the biblical Tower of Babel, which is the myth-origin of why mankind speaks different languages
- 14. Atwood’s Law: “Any application that can be written in JavaScript, will eventually be written in JavaScript” ~ Jeff Atwood, creator of StackOverflow
- 15. Thanks
Editor's Notes
- #13: See: https://caniuse.com/#feat=es6-class See: https://node.green/