What can you do with JavaScript
For a long time, JavaScript was only used in browsers to build interactive web pages. Some developers refer to JavaScript as a toy language. But those days are gone because of huge community support and investments by large companies like Facebook and Google.
This days, you can build full-blown web or mobile apps, as well as real time networking applications like chat and video streaming services, command-line tools, or even games. Here is an example:
The next question.
Where does JavaScript code run?
JavaScript was designed to run only in browsers so every browsers has what we call a JavaScript engine that can execute JavaScript code.
For example, the JavaScript engines in Firefox and Chrome are SpiderMonkey and V8.
In 2009, a very clever engineer called Ryan Dahl took the open-source JavaScript engine in Chrome and embedded it inside a C++ program. He called that program, node.
Node is a C++ program that includes Google's V8 JavaScript engine. Now with this, we can run JavaScript code out of a browser. So, we can pass our JavaScript code to node for execution. This means, with JavaScript, we can build the back-end for our web and mobile applications.
So, in a nutshell, JavaScript code can be run inside of a browser, or in node. Browsers and node provide a runtime environment for our JavaScript code.
That's it.
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