Not my fav announcement. This funny (I think) video shows why: https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/wat
Disclaimer: I like types, I hate automatic casting.
Netscape and Sun Announce JavaScript (1995)
151–160 of 476 posts
Re: Netscape and Sun Announce JavaScript (1995)
#152> JavaScript is an easy-to-use object scripting language designed for creating live online applications that link together objects and resources on both clients and servers.
This one document certainly captures the state of the software industry before it was transformed by the Web (then Mobile then Cloud). The vision of JavaScript being both server-side and “isomorphic” is clearly articulated but it was a convoluted road getting there.
Let’s credit Google’s V8 and Node.js for making performant and concurrent/evented JavaScript ubiquitous. Netscape/Sun, Microsoft, and Sybase abandoned their server-side JavaScript efforts for Java/.net bytecode. Microsoft was the only relevant browser until Firefox rose from the flames like a phoenix. Linux and OSS software killed or maimed most of the companies mentioned.
Re: Netscape and Sun Announce JavaScript (1995)
#153Earlier 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?
The browser had an embedded JVM and applets ran right on the page. It was very similar to WebAssembly today, just a fair bit chuggier.
Two things caused people to backpedal from the applet strategy:
1) Because there was a large hiring pool of millions of fresh grads leaving college with a little Java under their belts, it having displaced C++ and Pascal as an introductory language, companies began Java projects and Java came to be seen as an enterprise language.
2) The JVM that Microsoft implemented inside IE had proprietary Microsoft extensions for greater Windows integration. Sun sued Microsoft over this, and won. After this, Sun pivoted to having Java be a browser plug-in in order to provide a consistent cross-browser experience, rather than having each browser vendor provide their own implementation. The browser plug-in was way clunkier even than the original embedded JVM was.
Re: Netscape and Sun Announce JavaScript (1995)
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 ever…
> everyone is mad because that means the web has moved beyond their childhoods
There is a bit of that, but there is also a realization that we probably did not really need most of these "advancements".
Re: Netscape and Sun Announce JavaScript (1995)
#155Not being on the web until the late 90s, the part I've never figured out is, what could you actually _do_ with JavaScript in the initial versions? The way I understand it, early JavaScript could only address HTML forms, links, and images. Can't modify HTML tags. Can't insert new elements. Can't update the page and re-render until DHTML in the version 4 browsers. Can't query the network until XHR. Ok, so now what? Do…
You could output HTML via document.write().
Re: Netscape and Sun Announce JavaScript (1995)
#156Not being on the web until the late 90s, the part I've never figured out is, what could you actually _do_ with JavaScript in the initial versions? The way I understand it, early JavaScript could only address HTML forms, links, and images. Can't modify HTML tags. Can't insert new elements. Can't update the page and re-render until DHTML in the version 4 browsers. Can't query the network until XHR. Ok, so now what? Do…
As I recall you could do what felt like quite a lot by abusing image swapping and frames + document.write.
Re: Netscape and Sun Announce JavaScript (1995)
#157Such a sad day for an industry!
In a slightly different turn of events, web software ecosystem perhaps could be different from the pile of hacks on top of hacks it is now.
Re: Netscape and Sun Announce JavaScript (1995)
#158Hopefully a few years/decades from now, we will be remembering the day WebAssembly was announced. [1]
Re: Netscape and Sun Announce JavaScript (1995)
#159I wonder in how many billions of dollars future generations will apprise this mistake.
Enough billions to make up trillions.
Re: Netscape and Sun Announce JavaScript (1995)
#160Earlier quoted context omitted.
For what? Imagine a world without Javascript? You have mini extension in browser to just auto refresh gmail
> Imagine a world without Javascript? That would've been a better world. Imagine the web that isn't an application platform. (it still isn't, but it's being actively shoehorned into becoming one)
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