Kurt doesn't touch on Sylvain's concerns about portability, security and development environment, and those are still matters that need serious discussion (for one thing, they are issues that have always interfered with my productivity in Web development). I see Kurt's post as a bit of advocacy to underscore for developers why some of the pain is worth enduring. I look forward to more posts on the topic.
Uche is speaking about Sylvain Hellegouarch, a hacker in whom I am fortunate enough to be working with on several projects, who recently brought up to a group of us his frustrations regarding Javascript and its lack of cross-platform support from a standards-based standpoint. He then posted these same concerns on his blog to get a feel for what other might feel regarding this topic. Kurt Cagle, another good friend and partner in many-a-hacking crimes (the good kind, not the bad ;) took the task of answering a question Sylvain posed at the end of his rant, "Is Javascript Dead?". Being taken to task by one of his readers Kurt came clean (if you read the previous link you'll see that was a cheezy attempt at tieing the comments with Kurt's confession -- sorry ;) as to the reason(lack of sleep) things were not as clear as they normally are and followed with clarifications to his previous comments.
So?
Good question :)
The reason why I believe things are about to get a little bit hotter in this area is due to a project in which I was recently given early access to the beta bits, and if all goes well with the documentation process, will find come Monday morning a link with access to the first Release Candidate for a project called TurboTIBET. I don't want to talk too much about things until I have a chance to play with the RC. But if what I have seen so far says anything about what to expect in the RC... lets just say AJAX is about to get its dirty little face scrubbed (hey, I'm not the one that created an acronym matching a well known bathroom cleaning products, don't blame me for exploiting the opportunity presented when the time was right to do so :) with the pristine and spiritually clean TIBET project, a project that takes the technologies that give AJAX its acronymic base and brings them to the Enterprise Application level with built in support for a wide variety of existing web services tecnologies and frameworks including Amazon (and about 10 or 12 more), XML-RPC, XML Schema, XForms, XPath, XSLT, Xeverything else, wrapping them into a common-base of cross platform Javascript-based API functions, and bringing the ability to give your web-based applications a true "application" feel to them.
Add to this the fact that E4X brings to the world of ECMAScript the ability to process XML within the browser in a much more natural, NON-DOM type way, treating it as a first class data type (if such a thing actually existed in ECMAScript -- I guess first class object would be the proper term to use here. I think.) and we have ourselves a whole new ball game in the world of client-side browser-based scripting.
For now its a wait-and-see game. But if things continue to progress it wouldn't surprise me a bit to see ECMAScript to continue forward as a popular weblication development language, finally losing the "rollover" label that has been, for the most part, its most common use on the web thus far.
[UPDATE: I'm about to shoot the announcement out on the announcements feed of this blog, but in reading the release notes for the Mono 1.1.9 release I noticed this little snippet regarding the Mono-Project's JScript.NET Compiler progress:
Progress: JScript now passes 4586 tests of the Mozilla ECMAScript test suite out of 5994 (76.51%)
I have no idea what percentage of the Mozilla ECMAScript test suite Microsoft's JScript.NET implementation would pass -- based on my own experience, probably not much -- but with Mono's cross-platform capabilities, including Windows, I'm thinking outloud and wondering what this could mean in regards to developing a multi-use source code base scenario in which you could use the same JScript[1] in your browser-based apps, to then compile it into CIL, possibly exchanging out the HTML for XAML, which of course is also now available as part of the Mono-Projects offerings to the .NET world of software development.
Might be worth looking into a bit further...
[1] : If any of you are wondering, JScript is the marketing name Microsoft gave to their own implementation of ECMAScript -- you can't blame them... Javascript was the marketing name used to bring greater attention to what was termed LiveConnect, or Live Script, the names originally used for this Netscape backed scripting language (developed by Brendan Eich, now of Mozilla Foundation and Mozilla Corporation Fame) that would eventually become standardized by the ECMA and termed ECMAScript. With Netscape looking to capitalize on the increasing popularity of the Java programming language you can't really take MS to task for choosing not to use a marketing name that promoted what, at that point, was a GIGANTIC threat to Microsoft from a competitive standpoint.