Javascript [Electronic resources] : The Definitive Guide (4th Edition) نسخه متنی

1.4 JavaScript in Other Contexts

JavaScript is a general-purpose
programming language; 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.

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."

We can expect to see more and more applications that use JavaScript
as an embedded scripting language.[1] If you are
writing scripts for such an application, 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.

scripting language available in
Macromedia's Flash 5, is modeled after the ECMAScript standard,
but it is not actually JavaScript.