Tr/JavaScript'in Kısa Bir Tarihi

JavaScript, Java ile karıştırılmamalıdır. JavaScript, o zamanlarda Netscape’te ve şimdi de Mozilla’da çalışan Brendan Eich tarfından 1995’in Mayıs’ında 10 günde üretildi. JavaScript her zaman JavaScript olarak bilinmedi: orjinal adı Netscape’in kurcusu Marc Andreessen tarafından seçilen Mocha’ydı. Eylül 1995’te adı LiveScript olarak değiştirildi, sonra aynı yılın aralığında, Sun’dan marka lisansı alındıktan sonra, ismi JavaScript olarak tekrar değiştirildi. Bu, Java’nın o zamanlardaki popülerliğini kullanarak yapılan bir çeşit pazaralama hareketiydi.

1996-1997’de standart bir tarifname oluşturmak amacı ile JavaScript, ECMA tarafından ele alındı. Sonradan diğer tarayıcı üreticileri Netscape’te hazırlanan temeli baz aldı, Süre sonunda, çalışma bittiğinde resmi olarak ECMA-262 Ed.1 olarak yayınlandı: ECMAScript, resmi standart ismidir. JavaScript ise bu standartın en çok bilinen uygulamasıdır. ActionScript 3 ise bazı eklerle (aşağı bakın) ECMAScript’in diğer bir bilinen uygulamasıdır.

Standartlaşma süreci döngülerle devam etti. 1998’de ECMAScript 2 ve 1999’da ECMAScript 3 yayınlandı. Bunlar JavaScript’in modern “JS2” ya da “original ES4” üzerinde, Waldemar Horwat (o zamanlar Netscape’teydi şimdi ise Google’da) 2000 yılında başladı. Başta Microsoft katıldı ve hatta kendi JScript.net dilindeki bazı önerileri ekletti.

Over time it was clear though that Microsoft had no intention of cooperating or implementing proper JS in IE, even though they had no competing proposal and they had a partial (and diverged at this point) implementation on the .NET server side. So by 2003 the JS2/original-ES4 work was mothballed.

The next major event was in 2005, with two major happenings in JavaScript’s history. First, Brendan Eich and Mozilla rejoined Ecma as a not-for-profit member and work started on E4X, ECMA-357, which came from ex-Microsoft employees at BEA (originally acquired as Crossgain). This led to working jointly with Macromedia, who were implementing E4X in ActionScript 3(ActionScript 3 was a fork of Waldemar's JS2/original-ES4 work).

So, along with Macromedia (later acquired by Adobe), work restarted on ECMAScript 4 with the goal of standardizing what was in AS3 and implementing it in SpiderMonkey. To this end, Adobe released the "AVM2", code named Tamarin, as an open source project. But Tamarin and AS3 were too different from web JavaScript to converge, as was realized by the parties in 2007 and 2008.

Alas, there was still turmoil between the various players; Doug Crockford — then at Yahoo! — joined forces with Microsoft in 2007 to oppose ECMAScript 4, which led to the ECMAScript 3.1 effort.

While all of this was happening the open source and developer communities set to work to revolutionize what could be done with JavaScript. This community effort was sparked in 2005 when Jesse James Garrett released a white paper in which he coined the term Ajax, and described a set of technologies, of which JavaScript was the backbone, used to create web applications where data can be loaded in the background, avoiding the need for full page reloads and resulting in more dynamic applications. This resulted in a renaissance period of JavaScript usage spearheaded by open source libraries and the communities that formed around them, with libraries such as Prototype, jQuery, Dojo and Mootools and others being released.

In July of 2008 the disparate parties on either side came together in Oslo. This led to the eventual agreement in early 2009 to rename ECMAScript 3.1 to ECMAScript 5 and drive the language forward using an agenda that is known as Harmony.

All of this then brings us to today, with JavaScript entering a completely new and exciting cycle of evolution, innovation and standardisation, with new developments such as the Nodejs platform, allowing us to use JavaScript on the server-side, and HTML5 APIs to control user media, open up web sockets for always-on communication, get data on geographical location and device features such as accelerometer, and more. It is an exciting time to learn JavaScript.