ECMA

Yes ECMA.

I remember when i first got my hands on a real compiler. It was a christmas present from my parents. They gave me visual basic 6.0 studio, including the best documentation package ever made, the MSDN Library. Back then the library was about 3gb big and was very very orderly.

I must have browsed almost its entire contents in search of new and exciting features to play around with.

One of the things that caught my attention was the documentation for DHTML and XHTML. I don't know the background story for the namings but essentially it was MS complete documentation for ECMAScript also known as Javascript.

I remember thinking it was an unforgiving language, since error messages in IE never has been very good, and Firefox hadn't really made it into my universe back then.

Little did I vision that Javascript would one day be one of the most important programming languages (forgive me, script languages) we have. As a language without access to a local disk, very limited data structures and somewhat weak programming constructs, it is amazing what you can do with it.

This year a friend and I wrote a Javascript based "program" to access an experimental grid computing service, for simulating ligand-protein interactions.

I believe the power of Javascript comes from its relative simplicity, and immediate results. It is so easy for kids write Javascript that will turn dumb static webpages into vibrant web 2.0 experiences.

However I also think that there is a tendency today to spend to much time on implementing fancy AJAX systems on webpages where oldfashioned content delivery would be faster and much more reliable.

Anyways currently i am playing around with a Javascript progressbar for my Quick ASP Upload component - which you can find here