You should know about Javascript Evolution

Javascript Evolution

Javascript Evolution

❖In the hope of getting adopted by programmers, Netscape passed JavaScript to the European Computer Manufacturers Association (ECMA) for standardization in 1995. 

❖This brought about ECMAScript which uses a majority of JavaScript’s original syntax and has served as the standard for JavaScript ever since. 

❖Therefore, ECMAScript could be used in place of JavaScript.

Javascript Versions

Javascript Versions

❖About two years after passing JavaScript to ECMA, the first standard version of JavaScript, ECMAScript 1, was released in June 1997. 

❖ ECMAScript 2 was released the next year, with minimal changes to the previous version to keep up with the ISO standard for the language. 

❖ While JavaScript was now beginning to be adopted by programmers, it was difficult building websites for Netscape Navigator and Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. 

❖ Programmers intending to build cross-platform websites started having issues with developing such websites with JavaScript as the browser reacted differently to code for development. 

❖ In December 1999, 18 months after the release of ECMAScript 2, ECMAScript 3 was released with lots of changes. ECMAScript 3 saw the introduction of the language’s regular expression and exception handling features. 

❖ Immediately after the release of ECMAScript 3, plans to come up with ECMAScript 4 began in 2000. However, the whole process died down with the closure of this project confirmed in 2003 after ECMA released an interim report containing some of the functionality intended for ECMAScript 4. 

❖ In 2005, Eich and Mozilla joined ECMA so as to be able to assist E4X (ECMAScript for XML), which then lead to a collaboration with Macromedia. Macromedia decided to adopt JavaScript and use E4X in ActionScript 3. 

❖ Later that year, the adoption of JavaScript skyrocketed further after Jesse James Garrett’s paper was released where he described the technologies JavaScript supported as the backbone for the web, introducing the term Ajax as a way of building modern websites. 

❖ While ECMAScript 4 was abandoned, the successor to ECMAScript 3 was finally released in December 2009. This was a decade after the release of ECMAScript 3 and was called ECMAScript 5 and came with lots of new features including support for the parsing of JSON files.

❖ In 2013, plans were made for the release of the ECMAScript 6 but just as in the case of ECMAScript 4, the process slowed down. However, the project did not die out completely as it was released in June 2015. 

❖ ECMAScript 6 was renamed to ECMAScript 2015, and this naming pattern has continued for the latest releases of the JavaScript standard. 

❖ ECMAScript has further seen the ECMAScript 2016, 2017, and 2018 versions all released in the month of June of their various years. 

❖ Today, JavaScript is widely adopted as you can barely see any website without its client-side being powered by JavaScript with big companies like Google and Facebook relying largely on the language. 

❖ As at the time of writing ECMAScript 2018 is the latest version of JavaScript, with new features such as asynchronous iterators, asynchronous generators, and new regular expression features.