Section 1.4. JavaScript in Other Contexts

1.4. JavaScript in Other Contexts

JavaScript is a general-purpose programming language, and its use is not restricted to web browsers. JavaScript was designed to be embedded within, and provide scripting capabilities for, any application. From the earliest days, in fact, Netscape's web servers included a JavaScript interpreter so that server-side scripts could be written in JavaScript. Similarly, Microsoft uses its JScript interpreter in its IIS web server and in its Windows Scripting Host product in addition to using it in Internet Explorer. Adobe uses a language derived from JavaScript for scripting its Flash player. And Sun bundles a JavaScript interpreter with its Java 6.0 distribution so that scripting capabilities can easily be added to any Java application (Chapter 12 shows how to do this).

Both Netscape and Microsoft have made their JavaScript interpreters available to companies and programmers who want to embed them in their applications. Netscape's interpreter was released as open source and is now available through the Mozilla organization (see http://www.mozilla.org/js/). Mozilla actually provides two different versions of the JavaScript 1.5 interpreter. One is written in C and is called SpiderMonkey. The other is written in Java and, in a flattering reference to this book, is called Rhino.

If you are writing scripts for an application that includes an embedded JavaScript interpreter, you'll find the first half of this book, documenting the core language, to be useful. The web-browser-specific chapters, however, will probably not be applicable to your scripts.