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Source: Web Development

I started my career as a web developer before the dot.com crash. I learnt all about HTML, IIS, ASP, SQL Server and JavaScript. Equipped with the knowledge I built a few dynamic websites and carried my laptop with me to all my interviews and walked out of an interview with a job as a senior web developer. Before .NET existed, creating scalable and maintainable web application was not easy. ASP had a VB scripting engine. It was not scalable and it did its best to glue the web front end design with the backend database access. Most of the middle tier business logic and data access work had to be done using COM. Looking back you couldn’t build an elegant web application without .NET. JavaScript was used a lot in front-end web development mainly for client-side validation, scrolling tickers and special effects. But most developers never took Javascript seriously as a programming language. I know I didn’t but who would have guess that AJAX gave Javascript a more important position in the world of web development. Its power is hidden in the browser!

If you are not a Javascript developer, you will find writing client-side AJAX application in JavaScript a daunting task. That was one of the reasons Microsoft extended Javascript so that the Javascript language more closely resembles .NET languages such as C# and VB.NET. Actually JavaScript is an object-oriented programming language but there are a lot of C# and VB.NET OO type programmers who found coding in JavaScript less palatable.

In fact I read that some argue JavaScript is more object-oriented than C# or VB.NET. In C# and VB.NET, there are objects and classes and an object is an instance of a class but a class does not exist in its own right. In JavaScript, there are no classes. Classes do not exist. Only objects exist in JavaScript. One of the best feature of JavaScript is you can easily extend it. What is your thought on this?

Douglas Crockford shares his knowledge on JavaScript through his article “A Survey of the JavaScript Programming Language” which I think all web developers should read for a more in depth understanding of JavaScript as a programming language.

Here’s what Douglas Crockford say about JavaScript.

1. JavaScript is not Java. Neither is it a subset of Java. JavaScript shares C-family syntax with Java, but at a deeper level it shows greater similarity to the languages Scheme and Self. It is a small language, but it is also a suprisingly powerful and expressive language.

2. It is not a toy language, but a full programming language with many distinctive properties.

3. JavaScript contains a small set of data types. It has the three primitive types boolean, number, and string and the special values null and undefined. Everything else is variations on the object type.

4. Objects can easily be nested inside of other objects, and expressions can reach into the inner objects.

5. Arrays in JavaScript are hashtable objects.

6. Functions in JavaScript look like C functions, except that they are declared with the function keyword instead of a type.

7. Functions which are used to initialize objects are called constructors. The calling sequence for a constructor is slightly different than for ordinary functions.

8. Named variables are defined with the var statement. When used inside of a function, var defines variables with function-scope. The vars are not accessible from outside of the function.

Source: Development