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Netscape and Sun Announce JavaScript (1995)

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Re: Netscape and Sun Announce JavaScript (1995)

#111

Post by krapp »

blakesterz wrote: post #98
toyg wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was actually a fairly exciting time...? OOP had really just broken into the mainstream (with Java, the first OOP to really take off) and would go on to become ubiquitous, spawning tons of little new languages (including Python). There were multiple vendors pushing VB-like products, some arguably better than MS itself, giving high levels of productivity (who some argue have never been achieved since). PCs had drama…

I agree with you, it really was exciting. It was almost like the opposite of the "Everything is awesome and no one is happy" time we're living in now? Everything was awful, and everyone was happy. Remember being super excited the first time you saw an animated GIF!? Or you could mouse-over a picture and there would be a popup that said "hey don't touch my face"! Everything was slow and crashed all the time, but it wa…

I literally remember the day in my school library when I found out framesets were a thing and it blew my mind that this part of the webpage could move independently from that part. And no one even uses framesets anymore.

And you're right - nowadays we can stream video, audio, games, compile and run code from numerous languages right in the browser, and the web has more interesting and rich content than ever, but everyone is mad because that means the web has moved beyond their childhoods and gotten complicated with time.

Re: Netscape and Sun Announce JavaScript (1995)

#113

Post by dr-detroit »

astura wrote: post #71
overkill28 wrote: post #36

I still don't know why they stuck the "Java" name on JavaScript. Very confusing when the two languages are completely unrelated. > Java programs and JavaScript scripts are designed to run on both clients and servers, with JavaScript scripts used to modify the properties and behavior of Java objects, so the range of live online applications that dynamically present information to and interact with users over enterpris…

Brendan Eich addresses that topic in this interview. The whole interview is (very much!) worth a read but here's some key parts about the name https://www.infoworld.com/article/2653798/javascript-creator... >It was all within six months from May till December (1995) that it was Mocha and then LiveScript. And then in early December, Netscape and Sun did a license agreement and it became JavaScript. And the idea was to…

Not supposed to talk about Bill Joy hes not a gazillionaire eCeleb

Re: Netscape and Sun Announce JavaScript (1995)

#115

Post by Wowfunhappy »

netdur wrote: post #35
Orthw2020 wrote: post #19

What bothers me is that they actually never apologised. A simple statement of acknowledging the damage caused would do!

For what? Imagine a world without Javascript? You have mini extension in browser to just auto refresh gmail

I'm pretty sure the GP was joking.

Re: Netscape and Sun Announce JavaScript (1995)

#116

Post by tootie »

flohofwoe wrote: post #5

Nothing technically wrong with Java and JS of course, but this terrible PR piece which desperately tries to pitch Java as an integral part of the web, going even as far as naming an innocent scripting language for web browsers JAVA script truly demonstrates that the mid-to-end-90's were the dark age of computing (at least the corporate side).

In ye olden dayes, building big, interactive experiences on the web wasn't possible without Java (or ActiveX). Even the first iteration of JavaScript couldn't interact with the live DOM and CSS hadn't come into being yet. It was a sincerely held belief by technology professionals (myself included) that a desktop UI platform was the only way to deliver rich experiences over the internet. And honestly it may have to come to pass if the early versions of Swing weren't so slow and ugly.

Re: Netscape and Sun Announce JavaScript (1995)

#117

Post by dtech »

ethbr0 wrote: post #105
AndrewStephens wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Partly marketing but the integration certainly existed. As I recall, public methods in the main applet class are exposed to JavaScript. It was a little slow and clunky but it worked. The idea was similar to how web components are used today. Your web page would contain custom applets for a fancy input field, a calendar control date picker, and whatever other controls html didn’t provide, all implemented as Applets. I…

Technically, why are / were Java applets so slow? I never dug into the ecosystem deeply enough to understand (plus a bit before my time). Was it JVM startup time, Java xfactory-begat-y-begat-z code init time, what? Also, applets run outside the browser, correct? I.e. on the browser's host system in a separate JVM process?

A combination of needing a heavyweight VM separately from the browser and being either interpreted or having to wait for a slow JIT.

Remember Javascript was slow as ass too until the late 2000's when browsers were implementing efficient JS engines. If web pages would've been build like common JPAs they would've been as bad as applets.

Re: Netscape and Sun Announce JavaScript (1995)

#118

Post by desmap »

OT: I recently learned C++ after doing JS/TS for years. This was an eye-opener because there were so many similarities which JS inherited from C/C++. Plus stuff I've seen in other languages and environments.

After this, I thought that everybody should learn C/C++ at school, it's like Latin to other languages (I learned Turbo Pascal at school and didn't like how it handled pointers and its overall elaborative style).

Re: Netscape and Sun Announce JavaScript (1995)

#119

Post by tootie »

mseepgood wrote: post #13

> A server-side JavaScript script might pull data out of a relational database and format it in HTML on the fly I didn't know that server-side JS was a thing back then.

This was later but there was an entire server-side JS stack called Helma back in 2008: https://blog.astithas.com/2008/04/javascript-on-server-with-...

Re: Netscape and Sun Announce JavaScript (1995)

#120

Post by other_herbert »

ethbr0 wrote: post #105
AndrewStephens wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Partly marketing but the integration certainly existed. As I recall, public methods in the main applet class are exposed to JavaScript. It was a little slow and clunky but it worked. The idea was similar to how web components are used today. Your web page would contain custom applets for a fancy input field, a calendar control date picker, and whatever other controls html didn’t provide, all implemented as Applets. I…

Technically, why are / were Java applets so slow? I never dug into the ecosystem deeply enough to understand (plus a bit before my time). Was it JVM startup time, Java xfactory-begat-y-begat-z code init time, what? Also, applets run outside the browser, correct? I.e. on the browser's host system in a separate JVM process?

They didn’t have to be slow and you can communicate between the two with a parameter in the applet tag “ mayscript” with that methods in the applet could be called from JavaScript. I used that for an invisible applet that would handle communication and drawing HTML to the browser.. kind. Spa like way back in the Wild West days when applets could nearly do anything.
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