Google JavaScript library offers access to APIs
Google this week began offering an alpha version of Google APIs Client Library for JavaScript, which provides access to HTTP-based APIs on the Web, as well as to many of Google's public APIs.
The library is intended to make it easier to use Google APIs, said Brendan O'Brien and Antonio Fuentes of the Google Developer Team in a blog post. "The client library is also flexible, supporting multiple browser environments including Chrome 8+, Firefox 3.5+, Internet Explorer 8+, Safari 4+, and Opera 11+. In addition, the JavaScript client library supports OAuth 2.0 authorization methods," Fuentes and O'Brien said. Read more...
JavaScript upgrade to feature modularization
The next major upgrade to the JavaScript platform, tentatively named ECMAScript 6, is set to feature modularization along with other improvements aimed at providing developers with more convenience and security.
Detailed this week in a presentation at the HTML5 Dev Conf event in San Francisco, the ECMAScript upgrade is being eyed for a 2013 release, said presenter David Herman, a senior researcher at Mozilla Research who has participated in the development of the specification at ECMA International. Focusing on JavaScript at an HTML5 technical conference makes perfect sense, Herman explained. "[The two] are pretty much impossible to separate. HTML5 is really about the new APIs and capabilities of the Web platform and JavaScript is the language of the Web platform, so you can't use HTML5 without JavaScript and JavaScript is useless without the Web APIs, so the two need each other." Read more...
Intel extends JavaScript for parallel programming
Intel is developing an extended version of JavaScript that brings parallel programming to web applications.
Codenamed River Trail, the project was revealed this week at the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco, and the company has open sourced an early version of the technology in the form of a Firefox add-on.
For the most part, JavaScript – the web's standard scripting language – does not give applications access to multiple processor cores, or even a processor's vector instructions. This puts web applications at a significant disadvantage next to traditional native software. Read more...
Google Dart aims to supplant ‘fundamentally flawed’ JavaScript
Demand for increasingly complex Web apps is steadily growing, but JavaScript is too fundamentally flawed to keep up, at least to Google's taste. Rather than waiting for major overhauls to JavaScript (aka ECMAScript), the search and software giant has been working on an open JavaScript alternative dubbed Dart.
Google's plan is to continue contributing to the development of JavaScript while also pushing Dart, with the long-term goal of having its language usurp JavaScript's position as the lingua franca of open Web development.
Google has not officially said much about Dart, though two Googlers will give a keynote presentation titled "Dart, a New Programming Language for Structured Web Programming" at the GOTO Aarhaus 2011 conference next month. However, in a purportedly leaked internal memo dated Nov. 16, 2010, Google's Mark Miller went into some detail about Dart (apparently called Dash at the time). Read more...
The senseless panic over Microsoft Office 15
Once again, the blogosphere is atwitter over something stupid. Early last week it was over the "report" that Internet Explorer users had lower IQs than users of other browsers -- which turned out to be a hoax that produced endless pontificating. Then as the week progressed it was the shocking "news" that Microsoft Office 15 will switch to HTML5 and JavaScript, making all your line-of-business applications obsolete.
Wrong again!
Old news shocks the blogosphere
First, Microsoft's plans to include HTML5 and JavaScript in Office 15 isn't news. Way back in May -- back before Steve Sinofsky and Julie Larson-Green announced that HTML5 and JavaScript would become the favorite sons of Windows 8 development -- a couple of folks on MSDN Channel 9 had already sussed out that Microsoft intended to bring HTML5 and JavaScript into the next Office release. Citing three separate help-wanted ads on the Microsoft Careers website seeking developers who could help make HTML5 and JavaScript development platforms for Office 15, they surmised that Office 15 add-ins could be written with HTML5 and/or JavaScript.
Microsoft was hardly hiding anything: "In Office 15," one of Microsoft's ads said, "we are focusing on building a modern application model centered around Web technologies like HTML and JavaScript, as we adapt to trends in the industry." Again, that was back in May. Read more...
Testing time for updated Javascript standard
A "minimal but needed update" to ECMAScript, also known as Javascript, has been ratified by standards chiefs who have promised greater consistency between browsers.
ECMA-262 edition 5.1 packs a number of "editorial corrections" and bug fixes that it promised will make ECMA-262 edition "easier" and allow for better interoperability among web applications. It updates edition 5, approved in December 2009 and ratified by the ISO, IEC and ECMA International.
To help further on the interoperability front, ECMA has promised it will also publish – for the first time – a standardized test suite so developers can see just how far implementations of ECMAscript adhere to the official standard. Read more...