Introduction
This is an unusual book. It’s about writing large web applications in JavaScript. That’s not what most people think JavaScript is used for. JavaScript is normally (or at least used to be) associated with just adding image rollovers, visitor hit counters, browser detection, and the like.
JavaScript Pros
No one language or technology has the market cornered as the best solution for developing web applications. Each has its pros and cons. Recent advances in JavaScript and other proliferating technologies, such as DHTML, Java, and even Macromedia’s Flash, have positioned JavaScript to capitalize on these tools and create relatively powerful web solutions. Here are some other reasons that argue strongly for developing applications in JavaScript.
Easy to Learn, Quick, and Powerful
Since JavaScript is fairly easy to learn, you can begin using it right away. This is perfect for adding some quick functionality to a site. Once you have the basics down, creating full-featured applications isn’t much further away.
JavaScript also rates as pretty powerful for a high-level language. You can’t do anything at the machine level with it, but it does expose many features of browsers, web pages, and sometimes the system on which the browser is running. JavaScript doesn’t have to be compiled like JavaTM or C, and the browser doesn’t need to load a virtual machine to run the code. Just code it and load it.
JavaScript also works from an object-oriented architecture similar to Java and C++. Features ...