

Opinion: The Emerging JavaScript Revolution - TomVolpe
http://drdobbs.com/open-source/231600203

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kellysutton
In a recent job interview I said, "This decade will be the decade of
JavaScript." I got the job.

~~~
tybris
I fully expect this to be another Java decade, for the following reasons:

1\. Android

Java now serves the full stack for mobile apps. The world's largest Internet
company, the world's largest on-line retailer, and the world's largest
computer manufacturer are all comitted to a Java-based front-end platform.

2\. GWT.

Java now serves the full stack for web apps. In the GWT world, writing an
application in JavaScript instead of Java is like writing it in Assembler
instead of C. In many ways, GWT is still in its infancy, but it is already
capable of feats like the Quake 2 port that seem inconceivable in hand-written
JavaScript.

3\. Google

Google has been a driving force behind the advance of JavaScript over the past
few years, but its flagship products have put Java firmly at the centre of its
universe. The costly Oracle lawsuit might make them reconsider their course,
but would they really after paying $12 billion for Motorola just to protect
Android?

4\. The cloud

Utility computing will drive an ever-increasing abundance of on-line services
that will make desktop applications fade away. While never popular on the
desktop, Java is well-established on the back-end and has solutions for most
of the practical problems that come up in the cloud. It will be the logical
choice for many new cloud-based projects.

5\. Platform-independence

As we move towards an ever-increasing heterogeneity of platforms, using a
language that is slightly different on each of them is not the way to go.
JavaScript has an extremely limited standard library, and no standardized
library format, or even a standardized inclusion format. Without plug-and-play
libraries, you are doomed to use whatever your platform provides.

6\. JavaScript is unsuitable for multi-core.

Multi-core is now the standard, even on mobile devices, yet JavaScript remains
inately single-threaded. A parallelized event system could be hacked on top of
it, but that brings us back to 5. Java is arguably not well-suited for
parallelism, but capable at least. You can ignore multi-core for a while, but
only until someone really starts to make you look bad.

7\. Abundance of Java tools, libraries, software, books, schools, programmers

This should perhaps be #1, but Java is simply what much of the world knows and
uses and you get major leverage from that.

I do think there is a niche for JavaScript becoming a popular scripting
language, in favour of Perl, PHP and Bash, which have become outdated due to
their focus on local I/O, rather than web I/O. I also think scripting
languages are about to become a whole lot more important with the advance of
utility computing. Definitely, JavaScript will explode, but the decade will
still belong to Java.

~~~
zubairov
JavaScript is the only programming language that runs on server, client and
mobile. Java always wanted to be there, however never made it, and now (with
Oracle) will also never make it in future. New name for Java is JOBOL.

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nodelog
Now JavaScript runs on both client and server sides. The question is how to
maintain JavaScript so it does not split into client variant and server
variant. Maybe it is inevitable.

