How Javascript Works Behind the Scenes

A web page may be the bones of a site, but the front-end developer’s javascript code is what brings it alive. Without it, we’d be looking at flat, static pages with images and text that do nothing. Javascript (along with HTML and CSS) allows developers to add interactivity and animation to webpages, create single-page applications that run in one HTML page, and more.

JavaScript is a lightweight, high-level programming language that can be used for both client-side and server-side development. Its most unique feature is that it runs inside a user’s browser rather than on a remote server, making it possible to interact with the user and dynamically update the content of a website without having to communicate with a central server.

JS is written in plain text, so it can be included right in the HTML of a page. It doesn’t need any special preparation or compilation, and it can run as soon as the browser is loaded and ready to accept scripts. It’s also the only programming language that can be used on all major web browsers, making it very useful for creating websites that are compatible with most users.

When it was first developed in 1995, javascript was meant to make web pages more dynamic by adding things like animations and other interactive elements. Since then, it has become one of the most widely-used and versatile programming languages in use today.

Most people know that javascript is a scripting language, but it’s important to understand how it works behind the scenes in order to take full advantage of what it can do. Specifically, javascript is known as a dynamic, weakly-typed language, meaning that variable types are not defined at the time of their creation and are instead determined during execution. It is also a single-threaded language, meaning that it can only execute one instruction at a time.

There are a number of different ways that a developer can use javascript to add functionality to a website, including by using script> tags to load and execute scripts. Scripts can be marked as async or defer to control their execution order. Async scripts will be executed as soon as they are downloaded, while deferred scripts will wait for other scripts and the DOM to be completely loaded before executing.

In addition, javascript can be used to implement object-oriented programming, which is a popular approach for developing complex web applications. This allows a developer to build objects that have methods and properties, similar to classes in other programming languages, but without having to explicitly define them. Object-oriented programming can be further enhanced by implementing prototypal inheritance, which is another feature that is available in javascript.