The Document Object Model (DOM) is a cross-platform and language-independent interface that treats an HTML or XML document as a tree structure wherein each node is an object representing a part of the document. The DOM represents a document with a logical tree. Each branch of the tree ends in a node, and each node contains objects. DOM methods allow programmatic access to the tree; with them one can change the structure, style or content of a document. Nodes can have event handlers attached to them. Once an event is triggered, the event handlers get executed.
JavaScript, often abbreviated as JS, is a programming language and core technology of the Web, alongside HTML and CSS. 99% of websites use JavaScript on the client side for webpage behavior.
ECMAScript is a standard for scripting languages, including JavaScript, JScript, and ActionScript. It is best known as a JavaScript standard intended to ensure the interoperability of web pages across different web browsers. It is standardized by Ecma International in the document ECMA-262.
SpiderMonkey is an open-source JavaScript and WebAssembly engine by the Mozilla Foundation. The engine powers the Firefox web browser and has used multiple generations of JavaScript just-in-time (JIT) compilers, including TraceMonkey, JägerMonkey, IonMonkey, and the current WarpMonkey.
JScript is Microsoft's legacy dialect of the ECMAScript standard that is used in Microsoft's Internet Explorer web browser and HTML Applications, and as a standalone Windows scripting language.
Presto was the browser engine of the Opera web browser from the release of Opera 7 on 28 January 2003, until the release of Opera 15 on 2 July 2013, at which time Opera switched to using the Blink engine that was originally created for Chromium. Presto was also used to power the Opera Mini and Opera Mobile browsers.
WebKit is a browser engine primarily used in Apple's Safari web browser, as well as all web browsers on iOS and iPadOS. WebKit is also used by the PlayStation consoles starting with the PS3, the Tizen mobile operating systems, the Amazon Kindle e-book reader, Nintendo consoles starting with the 3DS Internet Browser, GNOME Web, and the discontinued BlackBerry Browser.
A JavaScript engine is a software component that executes JavaScript code. The first JavaScript engines were mere interpreters, but all relevant modern engines use just-in-time compilation for improved performance.
ECMAScript for XML (E4X) was an extension to ECMAScript to add native support for XML. The goal was to provide a simpler alternative to the DOM interface for accessing XML documents. E4X added XML as a primitive data structure to allow for faster access and better support within the language.
SCXML stands for State Chart XML: State Machine Notation for Control Abstraction. It is an XML-based markup language that provides a generic state-machine-based execution environment based on Harel statecharts.
Tamarin is a discontinued free software virtual machine with just-in-time compilation (JIT) support intended to implement the 4th edition of the ECMAScript (ES4) language standard. Tamarin source code originates from ActionScript Virtual Machine 2 (AVM2) developed by Adobe Systems, as introduced within Adobe Flash Player 9, which implements ActionScript 3 scripting language. ActionScript Virtual Machine 2 was donated as open-source to Mozilla Foundation on November 7, 2006, to develop Tamarin as a high-performance virtual machine, with the support from broad Mozilla community, to be used by Mozilla and Adobe Systems in the next generation of their JavaScript and ActionScript engines with the ultimate aim to unify the scripting languages across web browsers and Adobe Flash platform and ease the development of better performing rich web applications.
V8 is a JavaScript and WebAssembly engine developed by Google for its Chrome browser. V8 is free and open-source software that is part of the Chromium project and also used separately in non-browser contexts, notably the Node.js runtime system.
Sputnik was a JavaScript conformance test suite. The purpose of the test suite was to determine how well a JavaScript implementation adheres to the ECMA-262 specification, 5th edition, looking only at those features that were also present in the 3rd edition. It contained over 5000 tests that touched all aspects of the JavaScript language.
Chakra is a proprietary JScript engine developed by Microsoft. It is used in the Internet Explorer web browser.
Chakra was a free and open-source JavaScript engine developed by Microsoft for its Microsoft Edge Legacy web browser. It is a fork of the same-named JScript engine used in Internet Explorer. Like the EdgeHTML browser engine, the declared intention was that it would reflect the "Living Web". The core components of Chakra were open-sourced as ChakraCore. In 2021, Microsoft terminated support for the engine, citing its transition to a Chromium based engine for Edge. Support has been transferred to the community, where it remains inactive.
CommonJS is a project to standardize the module ecosystem for JavaScript outside of web browsers.
asm.js is a subset of JavaScript designed to allow computer software written in languages such as C to be run as web applications while maintaining performance characteristics considerably better than standard JavaScript, which is the typical language used for such applications.
WebAssembly (Wasm) defines a portable binary-code format and a corresponding text format for executable programs as well as software interfaces for facilitating communication between such programs and their host environment.
This is a list of articles related to the JavaScript programming language.
Boa is an open-source JavaScript engine written in Rust. Boa was introduced at JSConf EU 2019 by Jason Williams.
