Programming the World in a Browser Real Men Don't Do JavaScript Do They?!

The mainstream professional developer community has never taken JavaScript seriously but soon they will have no choice. JavaScript is ready to move to center stage as the development and delivery technology for Web 2.x applications. In the past, most enterprise and product developers flocked to Java or C# while web developers moved to PHP, Perl, Python and more recently Ruby, with most ignoring the web based scripting language called JavaScript. At best it has been considered something to spiff up one's HTML pages. To make matters worse, incompatible implementations of JS and the DOM have tormented developers and made JS very unpopular with many. Until Ajax and Web 2.0 Douglas Crockford seemed to be the only advocate for JavaScript as a reasonable programming language. He pointed out that JS was really a Scheme like language with a prototype-based object model layered on top of it. I'm sure that popular author David Flanagan never dreamed that he would be best known for his book Definitive JavaScript. While many smaller companies had built quality widgets and applications in JS it is was the entry of Yahoo Widgets, and more importantly the that of Google Mail, Calendar, etc. that laid the commercial foundation for the Ajax revolution with a plethora of frameworks and tools. Rather than bulky and complex web standards, more and more of these toolkits support simpler Restful style services that use JSON rather than SOAP. JavaScript's ubiquitous browser availability makes it the frontrunner in that environment and this will no doubt ripple to servers and appliances. JavaScript is headed into the limelight once promised to Java, then later to Flash. It will be a must know language for everyone within 3 years. If JavaScript does cross over from the browser to other platforms it could inflict collateral damage on these languages down the road.