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Ecma Evolves JavaScript For Objects


By Alex Handy
June 15, 2007 — 
After 12 years, JavaScript is making the jump to 2.0, and a lot has changed since this language was first released in December 1995, in a beta of the Netscape 2.0 browser.

In the meantime, Microsoft swamped the browser market, Ecma International standardized JavaScript, and XML became a reality. JavaScript has slowly grown to become the most important language for Web developers, thanks to the copy-and-paste nature of Web code, and the popularity of mixing Asynchronous JavaScript and XML, also known as AJAX. Over the next few months, the language will be evolving into a more object-oriented form, if its creator gets his way.

Brendan Eich wasn’t always able to care for his progeny back in his days at Netscape, where he created JavaScript in 1995. With the browser wars raging, and Netscape crumbling, Eich’s attentions were turned elsewhere. Today, Eich is the CTO of the Mozilla Foundation, and he admits that the language has been down a long, bumpy road. But he hopes that the work currently going on in Ecma to build JavaScript 2.0 will help to smooth out some of the wrinkles in the JavaScript ecosystem.

THEN CAME FIREFOX
According to Eich, the days around the millennium were marked by a distinct lack of JavaScript evolution. During that time, AOL was digesting Netscape, its newest acquisition, and the Mozilla Foundation was just beginning to build its open source browser. The landscape of the Web was dominated by startup e-stores.

“Then Firefox [happened],” Eich said, “and interest in JavaScript [grew] around the same time. Suddenly you could drag Google maps around. Mozilla started having success with Firefox by catering to JavaScript gurus. This led to fermentation in the Web 2.0 space, with JavaScript becoming more important. We started working on [the] ECMAScript standard again.”

ECMAScript is the Ecma standard version of JavaScript, and it has been slowly moving toward version 2.0 over the past couple of years. For all intents and purposes, ECMAScript and JavaScript are soon to become one and the same, as Eich hopes that version 2.0 will be the standard upon which all other implementations are based. Eich noted that Microsoft and Adobe Systems have both produced implementations of this as-yet unfinished language, Microsoft’s JScript .NET and Adobe’s Flash ActionScript. He said he hopes that ECMAScript 2.0 will spur browser makers to adhere to that standard, rather than create their own specific versions of the language.

Eich said that version 2.0 will represent an evolution of existing capabilities, rather than a revolution. He explained that many of the things planned for JavaScript 2.0 will bring more of a traditional programming feel to the language and address deficiencies in the language.

“It’s difficult to share the same namespace in the browser. You can’t make private variables easily,” said Eich, describing JavaScript’s current shortcomings. “If you use the functional programming power of JavaScript, you can capture the functions and simulate private variables, but it’s a little heavyweight. People are used to classical object-oriented methods in Java. There is a compelling view for adding classes to Java. You can make objects that have private members [in JavaScript 2.0]; people can’t mess with them. That’s part of what we’re doing for JavaScript 2.”

Eich went on to detail the new open process through which the ECMAScript 2.0 specification is being led. “We’re setting up a site called ES-lang.org for public hosting of code and bug tracking to expose the reference implementation. We’re going to open-source it and get a community around it. We’ll open the Ecma specification and bug fixes, and help people make sure their own implementations are correct.”

The ES-lang.org site went live in mid-May, and offers developers the chance to play with ECMAScript 2.0. Eich expects more content in June, including bug tracking and links to reference implementations.


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