Sep
Javascript in a new Light
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I just installed minefield on my computer and enabled the new TraceMonkey javascript engine and all I can say is wow. In case you don’t know what TraceMonkey is, in short it is an extremely powerful javascript engine that allows for native compiling of javascript. Javascript is now competing with compiled languages instead of interpreted scripting languages. To see TraceMonkey in action for yourself simply download ‘MineField’ from Mozilla and go to your config (about:config) and set javascript.options.jit.content to ‘true’.
The browser wars have heated up with this new emphasis on Javascript. Google Chrome has released its’ browser with the V8 engine, Safari is being loaded with the SquirrelFish engine. Thus far we havn’t heard from Microsoft what it has to offer with its’ still-in-beta IE8. Disappointing but not surprising. IE has been lagging behind for years and the gap just widened. Not just alittle bit this time, other browsers are playing in a whole new ballpark and IE is nowhere to be seen. I’m expecting them to come around with something at some point but they have given everyone else a lot of breathing room to work with for now.
As far as web developers are concerned, nothing in this world could be better. We are being handed (agressively) a whole new multi vendor platform to work with. Javascript, used to be considered by some a dying technology, is now becoming more mainstream and powerful and is competing more and more with flash with animation frameworks such as Scriptaculous. All of this coupled with Google Gears and HTML5 standards is empowering us to build applications that we never dreamed possible in a browser.
These are exciting times to be a web developer. The possibilities are endless and a whole new web application era is being ushered in. I’m very excited to see what new applications will come from these new capabilities.
Sunday, September 28th, 2008 at 8:12 pm and is filed under Browser Development, Javascript. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.