The Triumph of JavaScript

Remember when many friends chose to disable JavaScript on their browsers for security reasons. To this day, this has become ridiculous--for the simple reason that JavaScript has ruled the entire web world. In this new computing era, full of platform diversity, we need applications that can run in any device browser. Native apps can run faster and invoke specific platform features that are more JavaScript-agnostic, but there's no denying that the cloud is here and we're in it. In view of this, will we continue to stick to the desktop or mobile apps for a specific platform, or broaden our mind to use JavaScript to develop applications that are acceptable to any platform?

The exact answer to this question, of course, depends on the actual nature of the application. JavaScript has many limitations--for security reasons, JavaScript cannot read or write to files in the client. and "real" programmers tend to keep emphasizing such flaws. However, the advent of jquery and a variety of other frameworks has given JavaScript the ability to build complex applications, and JSON (the JavaScript Object notation) can completely replace the data transfer capabilities of XML. Not to mention Node.js, it has just emerged in the latest round of InfoWorld Bossie selection, to help JavaScript strong into the server side.

How far can JavaScript go?

Coincidentally, there are two articles at the InfoWorld New Technology Forum, both of which are focused on the potential development space of JavaScript: A VisiCalc co-founder, Dan Bricklin from Alpha Software, Another was launched by Adobe's Divya Manian and Thibault Imbert. In the article "JavaScript beats native code on mobile platforms", Bricklin responds to the assumption that JavaScript execution is slower than native code:

The reality is that the mathematical execution operations that the native code can perform can be successfully implemented on JavaScript (and the calculated correlation is no different). This view ignores the objective reality that JavaScript based applications tend to have the same or even better performance than native code for a variety of different types of execution and computing.

Why is that? Bricklin explains that smart programmers have been tweaking browsers for years to optimize the performance of such execution. In addition, the browser advanced implementation capabilities also ushered in a significant increase, the most representative of which is the 3D rendering function.

From Adobe's standpoint, Manian and imbert the development prospects of JavaScript, and referred to the Mozilla-built research project asm.js--The Project "defines a set of javascript subsets, Can be generated by the compiler and highly optimized through JavaScript virtual machines. "What's even more exciting is that they also explored rivertrail, a parallel programming model and API built by Intel that specializes in JavaScript development work." The authors also mention that Adobe is pushing the new HTML 5 feature to a standardized level, including regions, Blend modes, and shapes. Throughout the article, we find that Manian and Imbert are equivalent to Flash and ActionScript, two sets of technical solutions to the dying of a punch.

JavaScript ecosystem

The success of JavaScript seems to inspire the industry, and now every week there is a new framework to meet the world, and other tools related to JavaScript development are endless:

Angularjs, a toolset for translating static HTML pages into JavaScript applications, while supporting the MVC architecture. Backbone. JS, a JavaScript library, allows developers to add structures to the application and represent data in model form. BOOTSTRAP, a framework for Web-page devices, is designed to dock with jquery. Enyo, an object-oriented JavaScript framework, can be used to create HTML 5/CSS applications. D3, a JavaScript library, is able to push vector graphics to the browser without the need for plug-in matching. Ember. JS, a promising JavaScript framework for developing MVC application development with rich functionality. Emscripten, a compiler solution that translates C + + into a asm.js (Mozilla-built, highly optimized JavaScript subset). JavaScript has a large team of support tools--just the best of the few solutions listed above.

Most of them are open source projects, and the continued expansion of these tools has become an important driver of JavaScript's strong momentum.

But...... What about JavaScript itself?

However, experienced developers have an aversion to this. Andy Oliver of the InfoWorld website describes his reservations in this way:

JavaScript has always been a part of the alternative development approach-what we really need to do is consider whether it fits our needs ... The managers I contacted liked JavaScript because it allowed developers to use jquery, node.js, and even use MongoDB to process a subset of the database transactions. But the developers around me obviously disagree, and they hate the idea of JavaScript development ... Development project leaders are also resistant because JavaScript has sacrificed a lot of valuable database functionality.

In other words, as a learning-and-limited development scenario, JavaScript brings a process of democratization to programming--once a developer's work goal is blurred and the final development results are messed up.

But more and more good JavaScript programmers have grown up, many of them with the support of Asm.js or the Intel Rivertrail parallel programming model to create outstanding results. And there is no doubt that they are not bothered by the lack of relevant tools at work. But the best is not necessarily the ultimate victory. For the x86 instruction set, the only thing that laughs last is the ability to live to the end. I don't know how JavaScript can scale itself to meet the needs of developers, such as the complex applications that make the overall functionality as rich as Microsoft Office. But given the way the world is viewed through a browser window, at least I'm not going to put the bottom of the money into this kind of project.