ECMAScript Language Specification | Search for a title, author or keyword | |||||||||||||||
ECMAScript Language Specification Standard ECMA-262. Edition 5.1 ( June 2011 ). ECMAScript Language is often referred to as JavaScript. ECMA ( European Computer Manufacturers Association ) is not an official standardization institute, but an association of companies that collaborate with other official institutes like the International Organization for Standardization ( ISO ) and the European Telecommunications Standards Institute ( ETSI ). This Ecma Standard is based on several originating technologies, the most well known being JavaScript ( Netscape ) and JScript ( Microsoft ). The language was invented by Brendan Eich at Netscape and first appeared in that company‘s Navigator 2.0 browser. It has appeared in all subsequent browsers from Netscape and in all browsers from Microsoft starting with Internet Explorer 3.0. A scripting language is a programming language that is used to manipulate, customise, and automate the facilities of an existing system. In such systems, useful functionality is already available through a user interface, and the scripting language is a mechanism for exposing that functionality to program control. In this way, the existing system is said to provide a host environment of objects and facilities, which completes the capabilities of the scripting language. A scripting language is intended for use by both professional and non-professional programmers. ECMAScript was originally designed to be a Web scripting language, providing a mechanism to enliven Web pages in browsers and to perform server computation as part of a Web-based client-server architecture. A web browser provides an ECMAScript host environment for client-side computation including, for instance, objects that represent windows, menus, pop-ups, dialog boxes, text areas, anchors, frames, history, cookies, and input/output. Further, the host environment provides a means to attach scripting code to events such as change of focus, page and image loading, unloading, error and abort, selection, form submission, and mouse actions. Scripting code appears within the HTML and the displayed page is a combination of user interface elements and fixed and computed text and images. The scripting code is reactive to user interaction and there is no need for a main program. A web server provides a different host environment for server-side computation including objects representing requests, clients, and files; and mechanisms to lock and share data. By using browser-side and server-side scripting together, it is possible to distribute computation between the client and server while providing a customised user interface for a Web-based application.
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