How does JavaScript get its name?
JavaScript, generally people get confused with Java, it should not be confused because
Java was created in 10 days in May 1995 by Brendan Eich, then working at Netscape and
now of Mozilla. JavaScript was not always known by the name which it owns the original
name was Mocha, a name chosen by Marc Andreessen, founder of Netscape. In
September of 1995 the name was changed to Live Script, then in December of the same year, upon receiving a trademark license from Sun, the name JavaScript was adopted. This was somewhat of a marketing move at the time, with Java being very popular around then.
In 1996 - 1997 JavaScript was taken to ECMA to carve out a standard specification,
which other browser vendors could then implement based on the work done at Netscape.
The work was done over this period of time eventually led to the official release of
ECMA-262 Ed.1: ECMAScript is the name of the official standard, with JavaScript being
the most well-known of the implementations. ActionScript 3 is another well-known
implementation of ECMAScript, with extensions.
The standards process continued in cycles, with releases of ECMAScript 2 in 1998 and
ECMAScript 3 in 1999, which is the baseline for modern day JavaScript. The "JS2" or
"original ES4" work led by Valdemar Howrah (then of Netscape, now at Google) started in 2000 and at first, Microsoft seemed to participate and even implemented some of the proposals in their JScript.net language.
Over time it was clear though that Microsoft had no intention of cooperating or implementing proper JS in IE, even though they had no competing proposal and they had a partial (and diverged at this point) implementation on DOTNET server side. So by 2003, the JS2/original-ES4 work was mothballed.
The next major event was in 2005, with two major happenings in JavaScript’s history. First, Brendan Eich and Mozilla re-joined Ecma as a not-for-profit member and work started on E4X, ECMA-357, which came from ex-Microsoft employees at BEA (originally acquired as Crossgain). This led to working jointly with Macromedia, who were implementing E4X in ActionScript 3(ActionScript 3 was a fork of Waldemar's JS2/original-ES4 work).
So, along with Macromedia (later acquired by Adobe), work restarted on ECMAScript 4 with the goal of standardizing what was in AS3 and implementing it in SpiderMonkey. To this end, Adobe released the "AVM2", code named Tamarin, as an open source project. But Tamarin and AS3 were too different from web JavaScript to converge, as was realized by the parties in 2007 and 2008.
Alas, there was still turmoil between the various players; Doug Crockford — then at Yahoo! — joined forces with Microsoft in 2007 to oppose ECMAScript 4, which led to the ECMAScript 3.1 effort.
While all of this was happening the open source and developer communities set to work to revolutionize what could be done with JavaScript. This community effort was sparked in 2005 when Jesse James Garrett released a white paper in which he coined the term Ajax, and described a set of technologies, of which JavaScript was the backbone, used to create web applications where data can be loaded in the background, avoiding the need for full page reloads and resulting in more dynamic applications. This resulted in a renaissance period of JavaScript usage spearheaded by open source libraries and the communities that formed around them, with libraries such as Prototype, jQuery, Dojo and Mootools and others being released.
In July of 2008, the disparate parties on either side came together in Oslo. This led to the eventual agreement in early 2009 to rename ECMAScript 3.1 to ECMAScript 5 and drive the language forward using an agenda that is known as Harmony.
All of this then brings us to today, with JavaScript entering a completely new and exciting cycle of evolution, innovation, and standardisation, with new developments such as the Nodes platform, allowing us to use JavaScript on the server-side, and HTML5 APIs to control user media, open up web sockets for always-on communication, get data on geographical location and device features such as accelerometer, and more. It is an exciting time to learn JavaScript.
The language's name is the result of a co-marketing deal between Netscape and Sun, in exchange for Netscape bundling Sun's Java runtime with their then-dominant browser." It was originally called Mocha, renamed to LiveScript, and then renamed to JavaScript.
