Javascript

Some thoughts on JavaScript



I don’t know about you, but I grew up doing image rollovers in JS and other groundbreaking “dhtml” stuff. Since then CSS has evolved, web standards and browsers have evolved, and things are much much nicer than before.

One thing that is starting to change is the way we fundamentally approach javascript. Not simply the recent popularity of libraries such as jQuery, allowing us to literally “change the way we write javascript”, but also there’s now much more awareness of the power that javascript has, and we’re doing more mission-critical stuff with JS. We’re moving from favouring simple procedural snippets of javascript that add twinkles to the page to fully object oriented JS applications, exporting great swathes of functionality away from the servers and onto the client.

This is a great thing. In fact it’s little short of a miracle; the servers are running faster and so are the clients! There seems to be no trade-off; by deeply integrating JavaScript into our web applications we’ve gained speed at both ends!