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Ecma Evolves JavaScript For Objects


By Alex Handy
June 15, 2007 —  (Page 1 of 2)
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.


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