Basic HTML version of Foils prepared 3 March 99

Foil 4 Why would you use JavaScript I?

From Overview of JavaScript I -- Basic Web Scripting Language CPS616 Technologies of the Information Age -- Spring Semester 99. by Geoffrey C. Fox (Tom Scavo)

NPAC JavaScript Examples
1 Originally JavaScript was designed to do what you think Java should do -- elegant dynamic animation on the client side
2 Then along came Java and JavaScript was eclipsed as it was just Netscape and not so well designed
3 Netscape tried to make it a server side language (LiveWire) instead of Perl but Java was much better here as well
4 JavaScript lived on for simple arithmetic on client side to produce somewhat better frames (as clicking on a link can call a JavaScript function instead of just loading a URL) and to quickly check forms client side without going back to server which is slow
5 A serious weakness was that dynamic aspects of JavaScript could only be used at "load" time and other changes of JavaScript required a "reload" which is real ugly and slow

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