History

JavaScript was originally developed by Brendan Eich of Netscape Communications Corporation under the name Mocha, then LiveScript?, and finally renamed to JavaScript. The change of name from LiveScript? to JavaScript roughly coincided with Netscape adding support for Java technology in its Netscape Navigator web browser. JavaScript was first introduced and deployed in the Netscape browser version 2.0B3 in December of 1995. When web developers talk about using JavaScript in Internet Explorer, they are actually using JScript. The choice of name proved to be a source of much confusion.

As of [2005], the latest version of the language is JavaScript 1.6, which corresponds to ECMA-262 Edition 3 like JavaScript 1.5, except for Array extras, and Array and String generics. [ECMAScript], in simple terms, is a standardized version of JavaScript. The ECMA-357 standard specifies [E4X], a language extension dealing with XML?.

About

JavaScript is a prototype-based scripting language with a syntax loosely based on C. Like C, the language has no input or output constructs of its own. Where C relies on standard I/O libraries, a JavaScript engine relies on a host environment into which it is embedded. There are many such host environment applications, of which web technologies are the most well known examples. These are examined first.

One major use of web-based JavaScript is to write functions that are embedded in or included from HTML? pages and interact with the Document Object Model (DOM) of the page to perform tasks not possible in HTML alone.