This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Web Buzz by Douglas Clifton. Original Post: This New JavaScript Feed Title: blogZero Feed URL: http://loadaveragezero.com/app/s9y/index.php?/feeds/index.rss1 Feed Description: Web Development News, Culture and Opinion Latest Web Buzz Posts Latest Web Buzz Posts by Douglas Clifton Latest Posts From blogZero

For many years I dismissed JavaScript as a toy language, something that was only used to perform cute Web tricks (who can forget mouseovers?). Worse (as is often the case), because folks quickly realized you could use it to open new windows, it was exploited (and still is to some extent) for advertising purposes. It also suffers from (perhaps even more so than HTML) the "how'd they do that?" copy-and-paste mentality that still pervades the Web to this day. The so-called browser wars certainly didn't help much, with Netscape and Microsoft going in different, proprietary directions with their implementations of the language.

I am not alone in these sentiments.

However, since the standardization of markup languages, JavaScript (ECMAScript), the DOM and, more importantly, the DOM Event Model (since JavaScript is most often used for creating "behavior" or interactive features), the language has really matured and is finally receiving the recognition that is long overdue.

Does your Web project require remote scripting (AJAX)? Then you will need to understand how to code in JavaScript. How about creating something using Greasemonkey? Or authoring a Firefox extension? Guess what—JavaScript is a key ingredient in Mozilla's powerful cross-platform development framework. If you want to get really fancy and add desktop features like animation, drag-and-drop, and so on, JavaScript is the method of choice.

Many of these examples ring true for me, and delving deeper into the language I found to my surprise that JavaScript is an elegant, deceptively simple, and powerful programming language. A new wave of frameworks and code libraries are paving the way out of the old days of HTML bulging with snippets of poorly written, embedded code. Another frequent complaint are the lack of tools necessary to ease the development of JavaScript code. Admittedly, the Venkman JavaScript debugger has been around for a while, but new tools such as the DOM Inspector, Console² and the MochiKit JavaScript Interactive Interpreter are changing all of that.

So , love it or hate it, even us old server-side developers must embrace this language, and add it as a permanent member of our toolkits.