In 1995, Netscape and Sun Microsystems announced the official arrival of the JavaScript scripting language. According to the original press release, JavaScript was intended as "… an open, cross-platform object scripting language for the creation and customization of applications on enterprise networks and the Internet." [1] The goal was to create a scripting language for the emerging HTML-based Internet that would run easily in the browser client context and would also have uses on the server side. The subsequent browser wars led to many battles over the role of JavaScript as a core technology for the Internet. Microsoft developed its own JavaScript-like language, which they called JScript, and the two implementations bore a striking resemblance but were just different enough to cause problems for web developers trying to write cross-platform programs.

The ECMA-262 specification emerged as an attempt to standardize JavaScript-like languages, so programmers would be able to operate independently of a single vendor. The programming language standardized in the ECMA-262 specification came to be known as ECMAScript [2]. ECMAScript still exists as a universal JavaScript-like language tailored for web development environments. The ECMAScript project website even calls ECMAScript "the language of the web," [3] and the standard is still an important means for understanding and predicting the evolution of web technologies.

JavaScript, JScript, and other alternatives such as Adobe's ActionScript, all offer compatibility with ECMA-262 and the universal ECMAScript language. The current version of the language is ECMAScript version 5, but version 6 is already available in draft form, and support for ECMAScript 6 is starting to appear in many popular browsers. Version 6 actually addresses some problems associated with contemporary versions of JavaScript

[...]