JavaScript engine

A JavaScript engine (also known as JavaScript interpreter or JavaScript implementation) is an interpreter (computing) that interpretes JavaScript source code and executes the computer program accordingly.

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 programming language. It has since been updated (in JavaScript 1.5) to conform to ECMA-262 Edition 3. The Rhino (JavaScript engine) engine, created primarily by Norris Boyd (also at Netscape) is a JavaScript implementation in Java programming language. Like SpiderMonkey, Rhino is ECMA-262 Edition 3 compliant.

By far, the most common host environment for JavaScript is the web browsers. Web browsers typically use the public application programming interface to create host objects responsible for reflecting the Document Object Model into JavaScript.

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.

=See also=

*List of JavaScript engines *Comparison of JavaScript engines *ECMAScript engine

=External links=

*[http://www.mozilla.org/js/ JavaScript] - from Mozilla Foundation