What is JavaScript?

JavaScript is a platform-independent, event-driven, interpreted client-side scripting and programming language developed by Netscape Communications Corp. and Sun Microsystems.

JavaScript is a general-purpose programming language designed to let programmers of all skill levels control the behavior of software objects. The language is used most widely today in Web browsers whose software objects tend to represent a variety of HTML elements in a document and the document itself. But the language can be--and is--used with other kinds of objects in other environments. For example, Adobe Acrobat Forms uses JavaScript as its underlying scripting language to glue together objects that are unique to the forms generated by Adobe Acrobat. Therefore, it is important to distinguish JavaScript, the language, from the objects it can communicate with in any particular environment. When used for Web documents, the scripts go directly inside the HTML documents and are downloaded to the browser with the rest of the HTML tags and content.