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:
“The principal office of history I take to be this: to prevent virtuous actions from being forgotten, and that evil words and deeds should fear an infamous reputation with posterity.”
—Tacitus (c. 55–c. 120)
“All things are moral. That soul, which within us is a sentiment, outside of us is a law. We feel its inspiration; out there in history we can see its fatal strength.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“In history an additional result is commonly produced by human actions beyond that which they aim at and obtain—that which they immediately recognize and desire. They gratify their own interest; but something further is thereby accomplished, latent in the actions in question, though not present to their consciousness, and not included in their design.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)