Summary:
This article starts off by defining Javascript as a scripting or programming language that allows for us to implement complex features on web pages. It enables you to create dynamically updating content, control multimedia, animate images, and a lot more. They continue on with explaining Application Programming Interfaces and how they support the top side of Javascript. What is also explained is what Javascript is doing your page from browser security, to javascript running order, Interpreted versus compiled code, server-side versus client-side code, and dynamic versus static code. There’s also a section where we are shown how to add javascript to our page.
Reason:
The reason I chose this article is because we have been doing a lot with javascript on our in-class assignments and projects and I thought it was a good idea to find something that is informative and can help with that. We haven’t worked much with front-end languages and their functionality for long so this article can help give us a better in-depth look at javascript and how it functions.
What I Learned:
JavaScript is a scripting or programming language that allows you to implement complex features on web pages. Javascript is a scripting language that enables you to create dynamically updating content, control multimedia, animate images, and lot more. APIs are functionality built on top of the client-side JavaScript language and provide you with extra superpowers to use in your JavaScript code. They fall into two categories, Browser APIs and Third Party APIs. Browser APIs are built into your web browser, and are able to expose data from the surrounding computer environment, or do useful complex things. Third party APIs are not built into the browser by default, and you generally have to grab their code and information from somewhere on the Web. A very common use of JavaScript is to dynamically modify HTML and CSS to update a user interface, via the Document Object Model API. In interpreted languages, the code is run from top to bottom and the result of running the code is immediately returned. Compiled languages on the other hand are transformed into another form before they are run by the computer. Client-side code is code that is run on the user’s computer, and Server-side code on the other hand is run on the server, then its results are downloaded and displayed in the browser. Dynamic Code refers to the ability to update the display of a web page/app to show different things in different circumstances, generating new content as required.
Source: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Learn/JavaScript/First_steps/What_is_JavaScript
From the blog CS@Worcester – Life as a CS Student by Dylan Nguyen and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.