A JavaScript engine (also known as JavaScript interpreter or JavaScript implementation) is an interpreter that interpretes JavaScript source code and executes the script accordingly. An interpreter is a computer program that executes other programs. ... Jump to: navigation, search JavaScript, in its modern form, is an object-based scripting programming language based on the concept of prototypes. ... Source code (commonly just source or code) is any series of statements written in some human-readable computer programming language. ... // A computer program or software program (usually abbreviated to a program) is a step-by-step list of instructions written for a particular computer architecture in a particular computer programming language. ...

The first ever JavaScript engine was created by Brendan Eich at Netscape Communications Corporation, for the Netscape Navigator web browser. The engine, code named SpiderMonkey, is implemented in C. It has since been updated (in JavaScript 1.5) to conform to ECMA-262 Edition 3. The Rhino engine, created primarily by Norris Boyd (also at Netscape) is a JavaScript implementation in Java. Like SpiderMonkey, Rhino is ECMA-262 Edition 3 compliant. Brendan Eich is a computer programmer. ... Netscape Communications Corporation was the publisher of the Netscape Navigator web browser as well as many other internet and intranet client and server software products. ... Netscape Navigator, also known simply as Netscape, was a proprietary web browser that was widely used. ... Web browser shortcuts on an Apple computer A web browser is a software application that enables a user to display and interact with HTML documents hosted by web servers or held in a file system. ... SpiderMonkey is the code name for one of two JavaScript implementations maintained at mozilla. ... The C Programming Language, Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie, the original edition that served for many years as an informal specification of the language The C programming language is a standardized imperative computer programming language developed in the early 1970s by Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie for use on the... Rhino is an open source JavaScript engine. ... Java is a reflective, object-oriented programming language developed initially by James Gosling and colleagues at Sun Microsystems. ...

By far, the most common host environment for JavaScript is the web browsers. Web browsers typically use the public API to create "host objects" responsible for reflecting the DOM into JavaScript. API with 3 clients, using the Unified Modeling Language notation An application programming interface (API) is a set of definitions of the ways one piece of computer software communicates with another. ... Document Object Model (DOM) is an application programming interface to access HTML and XML documents. ...

The web server is another common application of the engine. A JavaScript web server would expose host objects representing a HTTP request and response objects, which a JavaScript program could then manipulate to dynamically generate web pages. The term web server can mean one of two things: a computer responsible for serving web pages, mostly HTML documents, via the HTTP protocol to clients, mostly web browsers; a software program that is working as a daemon serving web documents. ... HTTP (for HyperText Transfer Protocol) is the primary method used to convey information on the World Wide Web. ...

See also

• List of JavaScript engines
• Comparison of JavaScript engines

*[[ECMAScript engine]]Bold text'Bold text'Bold text The following is a list of JavaScript engines. ...

External links

• JavaScript - from Mozilla Foundation