The History of JavaScript

JavaScript was created in 1995 by Brendan Eich, who was working at the time for Netscape on Netscape Navigator 2 (Wikipedia). Netscape was founded, in part, by Marc Andreessen who had previously helped create the Mosaic web browser at the University of Illinois National Center for Super Computing Applications (NCSA). The graphical approach taken by Mosaic and, subsequently, by Netscape Navigator was popular and the browser was gaining popularity alongside the web in general.

Andreessen believed the web would need some kind of glue language, and Eich was given the task to create a scripting language very quickly to add to the Netscape project to facilitate the "glue" functionality. Eich and the team believed that they should capitalize on the growing popularity of Java as a web programming language, so they adopted some syntactical similarities of that language. More importantly, they called the language JavaScript to create the false assumption that Java and JavaScript had some more significant shared heritage. In fact, there is very little like Java in JavaScript, and the languages are not at all related other than this historical anecdote.

JavaScript was generally successful in the browser, but in the early days of the web there were many competing technologies. Microsoft came up with JScript and, eventually, Dynamic HTML, both of which sought to do things like JavaScript could do. The competing landscape prevented client-side JavaScript from becoming a major factor in website design for quite awhile.

Standardization

In 1996, Netscape submitted JavaScript to Ecma International in order to create a standard for the language. The result was, after a turbulent debate, ECMAScript, which persists today. Once JavaScript was more standardized and implemented in compatible ways across all browsers, the language began to be more important to the creation of modern websites and web-based applications.

In 2005, Jesse James Garret (Wikipedia) published a white paper in which he coined the term "AJAX" (which stands for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML). AJAX described the way in which companies like Google were building applications that felt more like desktop apps on the web. Tools like Gmail and Google Maps were able to update information without requiring a browser refresh, making them more responsive to the user and efficient to use.

New design paradigms such as AJAX helped push JavaScript as a foundational component of modern websites, and the language has continued to be evolved and enhanced via the ECMAScript standard and the input of many major players in the tech world.