JavaScript creator ponders past, future

Mozilla's Brendan Eich describes JavaScript's history, the upcoming upgrade, and disagreements with Microsoft

 

Eich: Yes. Internet Explorer is a very flexible platform, and you can add scripting engines. They made it possible to add Visual Basic script and so they allowed other people to add Perl and Python; ActiveState did that. So we’ve commissioned Mark Hammond who worked at ActiveState to do active scripting glue for Tamarin, which is the Adobe-donated virtual machine for ActionScript, an ECMAScript implementation, that’s in the Flash Player.

It’s possible that if you’re a developer and you get this, or if Adobe were to distribute this active scripting glue that Mark wrote, that IE would be able to support JavaScript through the Flash Player. It wouldn’t need to have native support for JavaScript 2, it would get it just for free because Flash is widely distributed. Now I don’t know if Adobe will do that. It’d be good if they did, in case Microsoft does not ever get around to supporting JavaScript 2.

And frankly, if Microsoft does a great job on JavaScript 2 and knocks it out of the park, Screaming Monkey doesn’t need to exist. It’s really just a way of getting browsers, starting with IE, to be uplifted to JavaScript 2. Because a lot of people worry -- well, if Mozilla and Opera say, "Do JavaScript 2, but we don’t know when Apple is going to do it and Microsoft says they won’t," then how can anyone ever use JavaScript 2?

One answer is -- you can see this already on a Web site called ECMAScript4.com: Someone has just released a translator that takes draft fourth edition JavaScript 2 code and translates it into JavaScript that works in today’s browsers. That’s one tool you could use to use the new language soon. On those browsers that don’t have support for it natively, you translate to JavaScript. Those that do, you just ship the primary source straight through, say, Firefox. The other way to do it is Screaming Monkey and that could be applied to other browsers than IE, but IE is the one that most people use. So if we can uplift IE to support JavaScript 2 without Microsoft’s cooperation, and it’s part of their platform to support other scripting engines, then why not?

Paul Krill is an editor at large at InfoWorld, specializing in news and features related to application development, Java, and .Net. He can be reached at paul_krill@infoworld.com.