JavaScript – In The Beginning, Hello World!

June 13, 2009 by: Allen Sanford

In the beginning, well as far as Web development is concerned, there was HTML and Web development was a simple static collection of HTML pages which was referred to as a Web Page. Web development was simple , and there was not a whole lot to learn. As the Web, or WWW, or Internet, you are free to chose your own terminology here, grew developers began to yearn for more sophisticated methods by which to control to the look and function of their Pages. Not only the developers, but also the CEOs and other high ranking corporate bureaucrats began to push for more robust pages and portals as well. This push lead to the development of JavaScript.

Before the eggs start to get thrown my way about AJAX I would like to be proactive here and defend my position of writing tutorials on JavaScript and not just AJAX. All to many times as a seasoned developer I have seem simple task write with some type of AJAX framework that could gain substantial performance by using AJAX’s predecessor, JavaScript. The fore mentioned reason and the every rapid disappearing tutorials for JavaScript has lead me to be compelled to write JavaScript tutorials.

Back to the JavaScript background, when the push for more robust application and the development of JavaScript by Netscape, we began to see the Web not as a Static medium anymore but as a dynamic medium.

Without further procrastination I give you the JavaScript hello world.

^?Download hello.html

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html>
    <head>
        <title>JavaScript Hello World!</title>
    </head>
    <body>
        <script lang="JavaScript" type="text/javascript">
            <!--
                document.write("Hello World!");
            //-->
        </script>
    </body>
</html>

Well viola, that is all there is to using JavaScript. Now I would like to make a few clarification here before I close. One JavaScript is client-side not server-side, this means it runs on the clients computer not the server which is very important to know. You should never, never, never put any usernames, passwords, or other login credentials to your server in a piece of JavaScript, because anyone can see this information. JavaScript does not get parsed like PHP does on the server so you can do some things with PHP that are just not possible with JavaScript without using AJAX and a server side API script. Two, you don’t any special applications installed to use JavaScript, JavaScript is not Java.

Well that’s it, Have a Good One!