 JavaScript:
One of the Web's most Underrated Technologies.
JavaScript (originally known as LiveScript
and now also known as ECMAScript and JScript)
was born out of the necessity to make web pages
functional and dynamic. HTML is a static language,
that helps describe the layout of information
on a web page. It allows users very little interaction
with the information on their web pages. In
order for the WWW to have strategic use
in enterprise environments, browser users need
to interact
with the content: they need to have complex forms
filled out and checked, they need to
display hierarchical information in cascading
menus, etc. etc. This interaction needs to be tightly
bound to the content and structure of the HTML
document thus making the Java language not the
quite right candidate.
Having recognized this situation, in
1995 Brendan Eich developed LiveScript
for Netscape Navigator (which already at
that point belonged to Sun). In the original
press release
Sun explains it as follows:
| "JavaScript is designed for use by HTML page authors and
enterprise application developers to dynamically script the behavior
of objects running on either the client or the server" |
Because of its similarity in syntax to
the Java language, it eventually became known
as JavaScript. But let us be clear:
JavaScript is a rich and powerful pseudo-object-oriented
scripting language, that aside from this superficial
similarity, is otherwise not related
to Java. The language has objects which can
contain data and methods that act upon that
data. Objects can contain other objects. Although
it does not have classes, it does have
constructors which do what classes do, including
acting as containers for class variables and
methods. However, it does not have class-oriented
inheritance, but does have prototype-oriented
inheritance.
To give some idea of its importance, it
is estimated that roughly 70 to 80% of all web
pages make some use of JavaScript and most personal
computers (whether Windows, Apple or whatever)
have some version of a JavaScript interpreter.
Alas, here is one of the problems of the language,
mainly that it was one of the casualties of the
Browser War between Microsoft and Netscape. Today
with the latest versions of JavaScript we are
able to see more homogenous support for the language
in most of the important browsers and platforms,
in their latest releases. The current language
is standardized by European
Computer Manufacturer's Association (ECMA) based in
Geneva, Switzerland and its documentation is
probably one of the ugliest and driest pieces
of technical reading you can find!
Writing good and effective JavaScript
requires all the same skills as writing any other
computer languages such as C, C++ etc.
JavaScript has proved very useful in many
of our BI projects and here we would like to
present a platform for using JavaScript in BI
applications. We will be posting useful
scripts with examples that we have used
in our work. Feel free to contribute your
own scripts and make sure to put them into a
BI context. We will publish them with your bio
and your picture if you wish. Also, do not hesitate
to download the samples and incorporate them
into your own work.
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