Then they got excited about Java and renamed it which confused generations of programmers.
No one understood the power of JavaScript when it first came out. For example at first hardly anyone understood Closures, and the full power of JavaScript being a functional language.
And when Google made Google Maps which was dynamic unlike MapQuest it was a revelation and influenced so many people in what JavaScript (and the web) could do.
> complementary to and integrated with Java
Was this ever true around the time, and if so was it ever really used? I know that now we have a couple of JS implementations on the JVM, like Nashorn, that would represent some level of integration (you could call JVM methods from JS) but the idea that Javascript was "integrated with" Java back in 1995 sounds a little far-fetched.
If one of its original use-cases was to facilitate some kind of browser/applet integration then fair enough. But in the linked article there are only vague references to this that sound a bit weird or confused, like "the scripts would glue together an assortment of Java applets" or like "JavaScript will allow us to easily create personalized applets for the Excite service".
I found some docs @ Oracle from ~2013 that demonstrate calling some applet methods, but I can't tell if that is a later addition or was present from the start: https://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/deployment/applet/in...
edit: looks like Bill Joy himself said "JavaScript will be the most effective method to connect HTML-based content to Java applets" in the article, but I'm still curious how deep this connection is, or if it's just hand-wavy "our new tech is great and I have to tie it to another currently-popular tech somehow"
Anyway, I’m your age so I’m not 100% sure either but my understanding is that applets, for quite a while, were considered the software delivery platform of the future. Just open a webpage and get an entire end-user program running right there, no downloading or installing, nothing. It turned Netscape into something of a universal app store and people were very excited. JavaScript very much was intended to let the rest of the web page interface with the software program (the applet) running on it.
Your excite quote shows a key use case: ship a generic compile applet in a site which contains user-specific data, write a little JavaScript to send the data to the applet and poof, it’s personalized! Magic.
That success never happened though (and I’m not sure why), and most uses of applets I saw were of slow, ugly navigation menus with hover effects and stuff like that.
Of course these days with package managers and build systems and TypeScript, JavaScript is a lot more complex than Java ever was.
But they sort of ran "in a box", like Flash. So you have this particular rectangle in the page, inside of it something runs and works and does its thing... but outside of it, the rest of the page knows nothing of that.
What JavaScript was supposed to bring into the mix was that you might have a Java applet doing some "heavy-lift" stuff and then, you'd use the results of that to operate on other elements in the page. Like maybe you'd update a form, or some data in the HTML, or whatever. Also, obviously, the other way around. You might have some HTML controls that would then feed user data into the applet.
Yes, you could do everything inside the applet, but this offered an additional option.
It was certainly used, since I remember using it out of curiosity. I don’t think the use was widespread since it only worked in Netscape.
At first, closures weren't even available. I mean, in 1.0 and 1.1 you could only declare global functions. 1.2 introduced function expressions and closures. That was June 1997; the language was still changing quite a bit and it wouldn't be until ECMA standardization that things would become stable and clear enough for people to use. (Even though there would still be huge differences across browsers for years)
It's funny that Microsoft were the who were innovating with better features and a more coherent vision during the late browser wars, but they failed to capitalize on this innovation once they won the war and they could now just release IE6 with a shiny Media Bar and then fail to update it for 5 years. Nothing would ever go wrong, and no competitor could threat Microsoft, since all these toolbars everybody seem to adore are only compatible with Internet Explorer anyway. Yeah...
Especially that it wasn’t. JavaScript in Netscape 2 didn’t even have function expressions.
Er, it had everything to do with XML. It was introduced to give pages the possibility to fetch XML (typically feeds) and render their content dynamically; which is basically what it ended up being used for, except XML feeds were then replaced by simpler files.
Yes. XML was basically superceded by JSON, which was far less verbose and clunky.
The success of JSON has less to do with verbose/clunkiness but a lot with the available APIs in the JavaScript frontend.
JSON.parse() came a lot later. People started with eval(), which lead to quite some problems (executing code returned from some third party service, what could go wrong ....) and then various other attempts at parsing.