Perl Programming Course for Bioinformatics and Internet

What is JavaScript?


  1. A lightweight interpreted programming language with object-oriented capabilities
  2. Created by Brendan Eich at Netscape
  3. Originally called LiveScript
  4. Microsoft's IE implementation is officially called JScript
  5. Client-side
    • code embedded in HTML pages
    • interpreter embedded in a browser
    • executes on the client machine
    • intimately tied to Document Object Model
    • handles events
    • version/browser dependencies
  6. Server-side
    • code embedded in HTML pages
    • code executed by the server
    • propietary, vendor-specific technology
    • has access to server-side objects like files and databases
    • can save state across multiple client requests
    • much less prevasive than client-side
  7. Core language
    • Syntactically similar to C, C++, Java
    • Shares many characteristics with Perl
    • Not Java
Another scripting language that can be embedded within a web browser is IE's VBScript (based on Visual Basic)
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Dr Jaime Prilusky, course@weizmann.ac.il.