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: Java Script Engines
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“What would we not give for some great poem to read now, which would be in harmony with the scenery,—for if men read aright, methinks they would never read anything but poems. No history nor philosophy can supply their place.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“It’s a very delicate surgical operation—to cut out the heart without killing the patient. The history of our country, however, is a very tough old patient, and we’ll do the best we can.”
—Dudley Nichols, U.S. screenwriter. Jean Renoir. Sorel (Philip Merivale)
“Most events recorded in history are more remarkable than important, like eclipses of the sun and moon, by which all are attracted, but whose effects no one takes the trouble to calculate.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)