What's the Problem with Javascript?

There are tons of great examples of rich user experience driven by javascript, yet many developers view javascript as the domain of hackers and largely unstable. Why is that?

I think the main reasons behind the fear have been a lack of standards compliance from the leading browser suppliers and the fact that javascript has been traditionally difficult to test in an automated fashion.

Well, at this point the cross browser compatibility issue is largely avoidable. The language was evolved sufficiently through community spec recommendations that there are many powerful things you can do in any of the major browsers without changing any code at all.

As for testing, enter [[JSUnit][http://www.edwardh.com/jsunit/]. This is a tool that allows you to test drive your javascript (giving you all of the benefits of TDD) by running unit tests manually in a browser as you develop (much like you would manually in your IDE as you were developing code in java or C#). Additionally, it ships with Ant tasks, junit classes and a server that work together to allow you to execute your tests as part of an automated build. And you can do execute the tests against n browsers on n machines, allowing you to test cross browser compatibility.

AFAIAC, this changes everything.

More to come...