Happy anniversary Javascript. What's new?

JavaScript will be 10 years old in a few months. LiveScript was renamed to become JavaScript approximately around the same time when JDK 1 beta was released. It was a very exciting time: Windows 95 was only out recently and IE was bundled with Plus!. IE was lame, not free and nothing really to talk about comparing to Netscape. It has changed dramatically 10 years and billions dollars later.

I started getting a bitter taste of Javascript about 8 years ago. Like everything else that causes consistent pain it’s only natural for human being start avoiding it. Even getting simple things work consistently across IE and version of Netscape was a challenging task. I had a simple image transformation effect on my pages which was done with JavaScript. It was only about a screen of code and never quite worked right. The only justifiable use for java script I found since then was a client side validation plus a few other tricks to avoid calling server side for no good reason. At the time there was a number of menus, toolbars and other things done with Javascript around the Net, but for me they mostly looked like bells and whistles and and very likely pain to maintain. Often this code was performing a some sort of image animation which was wasting CPU cycles big time on a client while performing very little useful function. The message was clear: try to stay away from it unless you want a clumsy application that slow down you system to a crawl.

Slowly browsers had matured. Amazing little JavaScript apps started popping up couple of years ago. Some of them very sophisticated like http://www.fckeditor.net/ Personally FCKedit for me was an indication that JavaScript can be taken seriously now. This app is trully amazing. The maturity of JavaScript made AJAX possible and Google product family had caught everybody’s attention, specifically http://maps.google.com/ was really the most impressive JavaScript web based application ever. If you are programmer, you may also find DWR quite impressive: http://getahead.ltd.uk/dwr/ (thanks Scott). Nicolas have sent this link today which is quite imressive AJAX example http://ondras.praha12.net/sql/demo/ .

I think it’s time to review the JavaScript usefulness for web applications. CSS is a must IMHO. JavaScript is more mature now and it’s possible to get consistent results. Well, took a while, but better later then never ... Or is it? YMMV

I was looking around JavaScript component to reuse and these are the useful links I found:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/scripting/jscript/ Microsoft's JScript Web page
http://www.javascripts.com/ EarthWeb's JavaScript site
http://www.builder.com/ search for JavaScript section
http://webreference.com/programming/javascript/ Webreference
http://webreference.com/js/ Javascript Doctor
http://webdeveloper.earthweb.com/webjs/ JavaScript examples by category

Script Repositories :
http://www.wsabstract.com/ Website Abstraction
http://www.dynamicdrive.com/ Dynamic Drive
http://www.javascriptsource.com/ JavaScript Source
news:comp.lang.javascript

Great JavaScript components:

http://www.dynamicdrive.com/dynamicindex4/cmotiongallery.htm CMotion Image Gallery
http://www.fckeditor.net/ Needs no introduction
http://www.dynamicdrive.com/dynamicindex1/dropmenuindex.htm Drop down menu
http://www.dynamicdrive.com/dynamicindex5/dhtmltooltip.htm Cool DHTML ToolTip
http://www.dynamicdrive.com/dynamicindex4/logo.htm (Site Logo Script (a.k.a Geocities Watermark)
http://www.dynamicdrive.com/dynamicindex4/image3.htm Dragable Elements Scripts
http://www.dynamicdrive.com/dynamicindex3/tabdocviewer.htm Tabbed Document Viewer (IFRAME)
http://www.dynamicdrive.com/dynamicindex3/fixback.htm Watermark Background Image