Microsoft Looks to the Future of JS, Google Tends to the Present

It's not too often that Microsoft and Google manage to find common ground on any initiative. It's even less frequent that the companies are sharing the focus of their efforts, while working independently from one another. However, the end of June 2009 has seen both giants deliver initiatives designed to boost the interoperability of JavaScript. The only difference is that, while Microsoft is looking to the future of JS, Google is tending to the present. Two collections of tests for JavaScript shipped the past month, one from the Mountain View search giant and one from the Redmond company.

Google shipped “the Sputnik JavaScript test suite. Sputnik is a comprehensive set of more than 5000 tests that touch all aspects of the JavaScript language as defined in the ECMA-262 standard,” revealed Christian Plesner Hansen, software engineer. The set of tests is designed “to determine how well a JavaScript implementation adheres to the ECMA-262 specification, 3rd edition,” Google explained.

Although the ECMA-262 specification, 3rd edition is by no means an item of novelty; fact is that implementation can result in a number of problems from misinterpretations to interoperability issues. In this regard, Sputnik will help companies guarantee that their specific implementation efforts are error-free.

“One of the biggest challenges for web developers today is the many incompatibilities between browsers. Finding these differences is the first step towards removing them. In an ideal world web developers would not have to worry about which browser is being used to view their site and users would not have to worry about whether a site supported their browser. We hope the Sputnik tests will make the browser community take another step towards making that a reality,” Hansen added.

In turn Microsoft has shifted its attention to the evolution of JavaScript. The Redmond company released the ECMAScript 5 Conformance Suite on CodePlex, also a collection of tests, but this time for ECMAScript, 5th Edition Language Specification. Sporting only 900 tests the ECMAScript 5 Conformance Suite is opened up to anyone with sufficient skill to add items, as ECMAScript, 5th Edition Language Specification draws closer to finalization, a deadline expected by the end of this year.