The path to JavaScript

When I first started web game development last millennium, the landscape was quite a bit different. Java had just come out and was being pushed as the next-best thing in web development. While there are a lot of programmers who hate Java with a passion, a large chunk of my savings account is the result of third party work I have done using that language. At the time, Netscape adopted Java as the way to make the internet more interactive and even altered the browser scripting language they were working on renaming it JavaScript. Sadly, largely due to a battle between Microsoft and Sun, use of Java in browsers never became the dominate force it should have.  Java became more of a server side or back-end language with a lot of businesses adopting it.

On the browser side, Flash seemed to grow. This was largely because Flash was flashy. Flash was designed to be a vector animation program but added scripting and in Flash 5 an ECMAScript based scripting language called ActionScript. ECMAScript is the name given to the standard for JavaScript. Purists are free to correct my oversimplification of this but I am a programmer not a bureaucrat. Still, the scripting language that Flash uses is essentially the same as JavaScript.

I have dabbled with JavaScript in the past, but have never attempted to create a serious project in it. Still, with my ActionScript background, I figured it should be a piece of cake. Syntax-wise I was correct. DOM-wise, I couldn't have been more wrong. The DOM is the Document Object Model. It is essentially the API for browser-based JavaScript. I could not find an Java-Doc style guide to the DOM, which may be part of my frustration.  The part that really annoys me is how different the different browsers are at supporting it. Code that works great in Firefox and Safari does not run in IE. This means that I have to test a lot more than I would like which is why I think it may be a while before HTML5 replaces Rich Internet Applications written in Flash, Java, or other  RIA platforms. This is really too bad as I personally think open standards are better then proprietary platforms.

Still, next month will be my first JavaScript game. Working in it has certainly been interesting. One thing I will be looking into is better JavaScript libraries that make it easier to write cross-browser code. There are a lot of them out there, though the two I keep hearing about are Dojo and jQuery. I am not sure how necessary this will be as most of my stuff will be using the canvas for the user interface. That said, Flash CS5 is probably still in my future but I am going to slowly try to move to JavaScript for my client side programming.