Over the last five years, JavaScript has gone from a language for adding interactivity to a key driver for innovation on the web. A new generation of applications such as Gmail and Office Web Applications use thousands (or hundreds of thousands) of lines of JavaScript to deliver functionality and complexity similar to traditional desktop applications. With the advent of AJAX and script libraries, nearly every new site today makes use of JavaScript. These changes have also pushed browsers and script engines to evolve rapidly to keep up with user and developer needs to have fast, responsive applications and sites.
Internet Explorer 9 introduces a new JavaScript engine, codenamed Chakra, which fundamentally changes the performance characteristics of JavaScript inside Internet Explorer 9. We'll dive into what's new in Chakra, including the new compiler that compiles JavaScript source code into high-quality native machine code, a new interpreter for executing script on traditional web pages, and improvements to the JavaScript runtime and libraries like ECMAScript 5 support.
About Pete
Pete LePage works at Microsoft on the Internet Explorer team as a Senior Product Manager, helping developers take advantage of the web platform in Internet Explorer. LePage has been designing websites since his early days in high school, evolving from overlapping <blink>, <marquee> and <font> tags on GeoCities to properly styled CSS, managed hosted websites. Prior to joining the product management team, LePage was a tester on Microsoft's Visual Web Developer where he tested much of the web design experience.
In addition to his career at Microsoft, LePage enjoys travelling and is an avid film photographer; he has studied and taught at the prestigious Photographic Center Northwest in Seattle where he has recently completed his Thesis in Fine Art Photography.
LePage keeps an irregular blog at http://PeteLePage.com
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