History
Before the second browser war in 2008-2009, the JavaScript engine (also termed JavaScript interpreter or JavaScript implementation) was known as simply an interpreter that read and executed JavaScript source code.
The first JavaScript engine was created by Brendan Eich at Netscape Communications Corporation for the Netscape Navigator web browser. The engine, code named SpiderMonkey, is implemented in C++. It has since been updated (in JavaScript 1.5) to conform to ECMA-262 Edition 3. The Rhino engine, created primarily by Norris Boyd (also at Netscape) is a JavaScript implementation in Java. Like SpiderMonkey, Rhino is ECMA-262 Edition 3 compliant. Applications of the technology include Apple Safari 4's Nitro, Google Chrome's V8 and Mozilla Firefox 3.5's TraceMonkey.
By far the most common host environment for JavaScript is a web browser. Web browsers typically use the public application programming interface (API) to create "host objects" responsible for reflecting the Document Object Model (DOM) into JavaScript.
The web server is another common application of the engine. A JavaScript web server exposes host objects representing an HTTP request and response objects, which a JavaScript program then manipulates to dynamically generate web pages. Microsoft's ASP technology for IIS allows server-side code to be written in VB Script or JScript (Microsoft's implementation of JavaScript). Jaxer is a web server that runs entirely on JavaScript; this has the benefit of allowing the same code to be shared on the server and on the client.
Read more about this topic: JavaScript Engine
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“History does nothing; it does not possess immense riches, it does not fight battles. It is men, real, living, who do all this.... It is not “history” which uses men as a means of achieving—as if it were an individual person—its own ends. History is nothing but the activity of men in pursuit of their ends.”
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)
“Culture, the acquainting ourselves with the best that has been known and said in the world, and thus with the history of the human spirit.”
—Matthew Arnold (1822–1888)
“The steps toward the emancipation of women are first intellectual, then industrial, lastly legal and political. Great strides in the first two of these stages already have been made of millions of women who do not yet perceive that it is surely carrying them towards the last.”
—Ellen Battelle Dietrick, U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4, ch. 13, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)