If you strongly support or oppose this language, please edit the article to participate in discussion. This article is not about the language itself, just about its applicability for Ultrastudio.org visualizations
JavaScript is for surely the most attractive because of its wide support: unlike other approaches, JavaScript modules almost for sure will run. However after some more serious looking into it, we find a couple of doubts. First, the language and its built-in, default library seem too simple and restricted for complex challenges of encyclopedic visualizations. Almost for sure some helper library must be bundled to have it useful. Which one, and would one be enough? Security record does not look very good as well, even in comparison to Java that is also criticized. The only good thing is that JavaScript, same as Java, follows same origin policy, so not all cracks are actually easy enough to hide in the open code. Absolutely for sure it is not possible just to open pages for JavaScript: the same flow of submission, reviewing, pre-testing and approval of "scriptlets" should be used instead. We know JavaScript and it is actually heavily used on Ultrastudio.org , while at the same time caring that turning it off would not disable the site. However only strong community request would make use to add support of writing production visualizations in it.
JavaScript becomes more applicable when used together with HTML 5 that provides canvas. Canvas already allows to draw something informative relatively easily. Indeed, some (not all) applets can be rewritten quite easily using the canvas component.
The problem is, at time of writing the most popular versions of Internet Explorer do not support canvas at all. Only the latest version does but it is still in minority.
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