Java is to JavaScript as Car is to Carpet - a Beginner's Guide

Some recent discussions at work have led me to the surprising realization that lots of people working in IT don't understand that Java and JavaScript are almost completely unrelated to each other. This is actually a fairly important misunderstanding to correct:  it leads to wasted troubleshooting efforts, such as downgrading or upgrading Windows Java installations in response to browser JavaScript errors.

I found the title of this blog entry in a StackOverflow post: "Java is to JavaScript as Car is to Carpet". That's pretty much it, in a nutshell. For the record, the only things that Java and JavaScript have in common are:

1. They are both programming languages.
2. The word "Java".
3. Both came out of the web technology explosion of the early 1990s.
4. Both are frequently encountered in the context of web browsers.

Java is a compiled programming language that was originally developed with a major goal of allowing similar or identical codebases to run on different platforms without needing to be recompiled. It does this by compiling to "bytecode" rather than platform-specific machine code, which then typically runs inside a so-called "Java Virtual Machine". Java was originally developed and controlled by Sun Microsystems (now Oracle), but it has since been re-licensed under the GNU Public License. Numerous open-source Java implementations now exist, but the Oracle/Sun version is still the most familiar to the average user.

Java is associated with the web browser experience because of the widespread use of Java "applets" that are embedded in browser windows. Applets are not technically part of the browser; the compiled Java bytecode is downloaded by the browser and executed in a Java Virtual Machine (JVM) as a separate process. Applets are frequently transferred as a compressed "Java archive", or JAR file. Applets downloaded by a browser do not necessarily need to run in a browser window, but the fact that they are frequently embedded there leads to some confusion.

Neither is Java necessarily a client-side technology: many popular server-side applications are written in Java and execute in a server-side JVM. Google's Android platform extends things even further, using Java as the programming language but compiling the bytecode to execute on their own proprietary virtual machine.

JavaScript, on the other hand, is an interpreted (i.e., non-compiled) programming language that was originally developed to run inside web browsers. It was developed at Netscape and was later adopted by Microsoft and standardized as "ECMAScript". The use of "Java" in the name "JavaScript" was probably an attempt to piggyback on the popularity of Java; the two languages have almost nothing in common from a technical perspective.

JavaScript is most frequently used to control the web browser experience, but there are many projects that use JavaScript completely outside the browser. My first experience with this dates back to the late 1990s, when I used a JavaScript-based commercial tool to automate software deployments to Windows workstations. Today, there are many interesting non-browser-embedded JavaScript platforms, such as Node.js and PhantomJS.