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Welcome back everyone. In this video we’re gonna be looking at JavaScript. But let’s look into some of the history behind it. To start, we’re going to talk about Brendan Eich. Brendan Eich was actually one of the people who co founded the Mozilla project to of course launching the major browser Firefox, but he’s also the creator of JavaScript. Eich had a master’s degree from the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, but then he started working at Silicon Graphics, working about seven years or so on an operating systems project, and primarily a lot of networking code. But he then started at Netscape in 1995. And when he joined Netscape, he really intended to put the language called scheme into the web browsers. Now, Netscape, of course is no longer prevalent in today’s internet world, but Netscape was really primarily one of the leading internet companies back in the mid to late 90s. But as Brendan started to work and putting scheme into the web browser, Netscape noted that his project actually resembled the Java syntax, and pushed really quickly after after that point. His project released a little over a week later, to accommodate Netscape Navigator 2. And so he was really pushed really time pressed underneath, and a lot of pressure to get this language actually released. And it actually underwent many different name changes during that time. One point it was called mocha, then LiveScript, and then eventually called JavaScript all in the same month. While it does resemble Java, JavaScript itself is actually an entirely different category of programming language. While Java is very object oriented JavaScript is more of a as as it sounds, right, more of a scripting programming language designed specifically for the web.
Now, JavaScript, as I mentioned, originally called LiveScript at a time, was finally released in 1995, and has gone over multiple iterations since then, many and different important updates as we as we go along. But JavaScript was used to manipulate the Document Object Model after a page was actually loaded. So JavaScript was one of the first languages out there that allowed us to manipulate the webpage. After it was actually presented to the user. When HTML was first released, the page was served and loaded on the user’s web browser. And that was it. Nothing actually changed after the page was, was loaded. So if you wanted something to change, you’d have to be redirected or reloaded into an entirely different page or refresh the page to get that change to actually happen. JavaScript allows you to edit that page live, so the page doesn’t actually have to completely be reloaded in order for an interactive component to be utilized as part of the content. So this makes the webpage much more interactive, and much more entertaining overall, and much more useful for the user. And while it was mentioned by Netscape to be related, or looking like the Java programming language, it is completely unrelated. As far as the general structure and usage of and operation of the languages.
JavaScript, while it does allow you to manipulate the Document Object Model behind the scenes, it can be a little bit cumbersome, and it had its limitations. And so that’s when jQuery was released in 2006. jQuery is a cross platform JavaScript library that made it a lot easier to manipulate and edit the DOM elements. So JavaScript caught a lot of flack because it was kind of difficult to use and very clunky. And if you wanted to do anything fancy, there’s a lot of code. And overall, it really just wasn’t that user friendly. So jQuery made a leak to try to make this process a lot easier for developers to get the results that they wanted in much cleaner and shorter amount of code. So JavaScript and jQuery in general, what you’ll see as you start using, it has a lot of different plugins and a lot of different frameworks. So very rarely anymore. Will you see a web page that uses JavaScript purely in its raw form, majority of web pages anymore are going to utilize some form of framework or external library to actually work and get the end functionality that they want. But we’ll talk more about this later.