Technology and Engineering Atlas

How Things Are Built
Sign In
Text size
100%
Theme
Inventions

JavaScript

Software Engineering

Citation Formats

General Reference

APA Style

BibTeX

JavaScript is a high-level scripting language created by the American programmer Brendan Eich for Netscape Communications, who wrote its first working implementation in just ten days in May 1995 for the Netscape Navigator browser, where it was originally called Mocha and then LiveScript before Netscape renamed it JavaScript to capitalize on the popularity of Sun Microsystems' unrelated Java language. Netscape submitted the language to the standards body Ecma International in 1996, which published its standardized specification as ECMAScript the following year, giving competing browser makers a common target to implement. Designed originally to let web pages validate forms and respond to simple user actions without a round trip to the server, JavaScript became the only scripting language every major web browser runs natively, and the later Node.js runtime, released in 2009, extended it from browser pages onto web servers, making it one of the most widely used programming languages in the world.

Comments (0)
No comments yet. Be the first to share a thought.
Reader Challenges (0 open reader challenges)
No disputes yet. Spotted an error or a better source? Open the first one.

View At A Past Year

The atlas records no dated fact of its own for this entry, so there is no other year to choose.