Core Web Technologies
JavaScript is a high-level, dynamic, untyped, and interpreted programming language. It has been standardized in the ECMAScript language specification. Alongside HTML and CSS, it is one of the three core technologies of World Wide Web content production; the majority of websites employ it and it is supported by all modern Web browsers without plug-ins. JavaScript is prototype-based with first-class functions, making it a multi-paradigm language, supporting object-oriented, imperative, and functional programming styles. It has an API for working with text, arrays, dates and regular expressions, but does not include any I/O, such as networking, storage, or graphics facilities, relying for these upon the host environment in which it is embedded.
Although there are strong outward similarities between JavaScript and Java, including language name, syntax, and respective standard libraries, the two are distinct languages and differ greatly in their design. JavaScript was influenced by programming languages such as Self and Scheme.
JavaScript is also used in environments that are not Web-based, such as PDF documents, site-specific browsers, and desktop widgets. Newer and faster JavaScript virtual machines (VMs) and platforms built upon them have also increased the popularity of JavaScript for server-side Web applications. On the client side, JavaScript has been traditionally implemented as an interpreted language, but more recent browsers perform just-in-time compilation. It is also used in game development, the creation of desktop and mobile applications, and server-side network programming with run-time environments such as Node.js.
JavaScript is almost entirely object-based. JavaScript typically relies on a run-time environment (e.g., a Web browser) to provide objects and methods by which scripts can interact with the environment (e.g., a webpage DOM). It also relies on the run-time environment to provide the ability to include/import scripts. The most common use of JavaScript is to add client-side behavior to HTML pages, also known as Dynamic HTML (DHTML). Scripts are embedded in or included from HTML pages and interact with the Document Object Model (DOM) of the page. Because JavaScript code can run locally in a user’s browser (rather than on a remote server), the browser can respond to user actions quickly, making an application more responsive. Furthermore, JavaScript code can detect user actions that HTML alone cannot, such as individual keystrokes. Applications such as Gmail take advantage of this: much of the user-interface logic is written in JavaScript, and JavaScript dispatches requests for information (such as the content of an e-mail message) to the server. The wider trend of Ajax programming similarly exploits this strength.
Because JavaScript is the only language that the most popular browsers share support for, it has become a target language for many frameworks in other languages, even though JavaScript was never intended to be such a language. Despite the performance limitations inherent to its dynamic nature, the increasing speed of JavaScript engines has made the language a surprisingly feasible compilation target.
A common misconception is that JavaScript is similar or closely related to Java. It is true that both have a C-like syntax (the C language being their most immediate common ancestor language). They also are both typically sandboxed (when used inside a browser), and JavaScript was designed with Java’s syntax and standard library in mind. In particular, all Java keywords were reserved in original JavaScript, JavaScript’s standard library follows Java’s naming conventions, and JavaScript’s Math and Date objects are based on classes from Java 1.0, but the similarities end there.
The differences between the two languages are more prominent than their similarities. Java has static typing, while JavaScript’s typing is dynamic. Java is loaded from compiled bytecode, while JavaScript is loaded as human-readable source code. Java’s objects are class-based, while JavaScript’s are prototype-based.
