Netscape Announces Availability of JavaScript 1.5 in New Netscape 6 Browser

Business Wire, April 5, 2000

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MOUNTAIN VIEW, Ca.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--April 5, 2000

Free, Open Source, Embeddable Netscape JavaScript Engine

Delivers Industry-Leading Standards Support

Netscape Communications, a subsidiary of America Online, Inc. (NYSE: AOL), today announced the availability of JavaScript 1.5, the latest version of its industry-leading scripting language. Netscape(R) 6 Preview Release 1, available for free public download today, features full support for JavaScript 1.5, allowing Web developers to create powerful new Web applications using JavaScript, the Web's most popular scripting language. By focusing on standards compliance and free, open source, cross-platform implementations, Netscape is once again making developers' lives easier by enabling them to use their existing skill across languages, platforms, and applications, on both the client and the server. With JavaScript 1.5, Netscape is the first vendor to deliver full support for the ECMA-262 edition 3 standard of JavaScript, and the only vendor to provide a free and open source implementation of JavaScript, which is available in both C and Java versions. These embeddable engines allow developers to easily and at no cost make their own applications scriptable using JavaScript.

JavaScript 1.5 makes it easier than ever for JavaScript developers to process numeric data and write financial, scientific, and mathematical applications. Now, developers can see as many or as few digits of a number as wanted rather than getting as many as 17 digits with no control. Using this makes most rounding anomalies go away. The easy-to-learn JavaScript language also now has powerful error handling features once found only in languages like C and Java. Any script errors can be caught as if they were exceptions thrown within the program. JavaScript 1.5 also provides full support for the leading regular expression syntax, Perl 5. Finally, JavaScript 1.5 dramatically increases the extensibility of the language and its objects through its new support for property setters and getters. Setters and getters for the first time make it possible to use JavaScript as an implementing language for fully-functional XPCOM components. This means that JavaScript can now be used to extend the core capabilities of Mozilla-based browsers such as Netscape 6.

Jim Hamerly, Vice President of the Client Product Division at Netscape, said: "Netscape has led the way in the definition, implementation, and enhancement of the JavaScript language, enabling developers to add JavaScript to their native and Java applications. By complying with standards to deliver JavaScript 1.5, Netscape is ready to offer a next-generation browser with by far the broadest and deepest support of Web standards. Netscape 6 will feature free, open source, and cross-platform standards support that Web developers have been calling for, including full support of HTML 4.0, CSS1, DOM1 and XML. JavaScript 1.5 will tie these web standards together and make them easily scriptable."

In addition, the availability of the free, open source, embeddable JavaScript engines from Netscape enables developers to use the familiar syntax of the Web's most popular scripting language to make their own products scriptable. JavaScript engines load, parse, and execute JavaScript code. Using the familiar JavaScript syntax reduces training costs and increases productivity for customers, who no longer need to study and master a proprietary scripting language syntax. Because they have a cross-platform architecture and are available as open source in both C and Java versions, the JavaScript engines can be used everywhere--all platforms, all applications, all devices.

When embedded in a product such as a browser or an authoring tool, they make it possible for customers to write JavaScript scripts that control that product. This makes the product more open and enables more productive use of it by customers. Netscape's development and testing of the JavaScript engines has been assisted and expedited by the external testing and code enhancements enabled by the mozilla.org open source development initiative.

Chris O'Brien, President and COO of Softcom, said: "The tight integration of Netscape's Java-based JavaScript 1.5 with Softcom's Java-based RealPlayer plug-in, RJ, enables Softcom to quickly produce dynamic interactive video applications for our media/entertainment, retail and professional education clients, helping us to synchronize the full interactivity of the Web and e-commerce with streaming video. For the enhanced Oscarcast we recently produced for E! Online during the Academy Awards, Softcom used RJ to embed Netscape's JavaScript 1.5 in the RealPlayer, successfully integrating interactive chat and Java games, along with streaming video, within the RealPlayer."

Rob Meinhardt, Vice President of Enterprise Marketing at AvantGo, said: "AvantGo allows individuals to browse the web using industry-leading handheld devices and Internet-enabled phones. Netscape's JavaScript engine provided an ideal starting point for us to create the first solution for a mobile device that puts JavaScript-enabled interactive forms, content and web applications in the palm of a user's hand. We appreciate the freedom Netscape's open source gives us to meet our enterprise customers' needs."