JavaScript will (probably) be moving forward

A quick recap of JavaScript history: For a long time, ECMAScript 4 was a really feature-rich proposal for a next generation JavaScript. It even included optional typing! Sadly, the involved parties prevented this proposal from ever becoming a standard. Instead ECMAScript “Harmony” was proposed that changed very little so that everyone could agree on it. In order to avoid confusion that proposal was called ECMAScript 5.
In the video “ECMA Harmony and the Future of JavaScript”, Brendan Eich talks about ECMAScript 5 history and possible future features. And this is where it gets interesting. Among the features that might make it are catchalls (functions that supervise how an object is accessed), classes as object facories, concurrency, iterators (to abstract iteration), generators, runtime type-like guards, versioning. Modules are being worked on at commonjs.org, as a library. More on the proposed features can be found at the ECMAScript wiki.

Eclipse E4 is going even further in the web direction

The latest version of E4 contains “web components”. It warms my heart that they are using Dojo (=true client-side technology) for some of their experiments. JavaScript OSGi modules also look cool (don’t get too excited, though: they are for server-side JavaScript).
Update 2009-08-04: Check out SWT Browser edition. Its goal is to enable cross-compilation of SWT applications to something that runs in the browser. Flex cross-compilation is working, other approaches are under investigation.

JavaScript is becoming a nice language

Apart from impressive speed improvements via Google Chrome's V8 or Firefox's TraceMonkey, I had forgotten that new versions of JavaScript had some really nice language features (I still hope that optional types make it into ECMAScript 4). The article “Pythonic Javascript, it's Python with braces!” reminded me.