2.2.1- Which Scripting Language to Use

Which Scripting Language to Use

There are quite a number of scripting languages. Arguably the two most popular at the moment (and certainly the two of interestto us in this book) are VBScript and JavaScript. JavaScript was the first client-sidescripting language (we'll talk about the difference between client-side andserver-side scripting shortly). The VBScript scripting language was developedby Microsoft – it's based on their Visual Basic programming language.

Each script that we write must be interpreted at the time itis requested. For this purpose, each scripting language has a scriptinterpreter – the script engine. So a scriptor program written in VBScript must be sent to a VBScript script engine, and ascript or program written in JavaScript must be sent to a JavaScript scriptengine. Microsoft's IIS 5.0 web server comes with script engines for bothVBScript and JScript. (JScript is Microsoft's implementation of JavaScript.)

Note thatJavaScript shouldn't be confused with Java. In fact, JavaScript was originallyto have been named LiveScript; at that time, Netscape had intended to marketthe language completely separately from Java. However, following the popularityof Java, Netscape teamed up with Sun during the development of LiveScript,changed its name to JavaScript, and borrowed several structures from Java'ssyntax. Hence, the JavaScript scripting language shares some superficialresemblances with its namesake.