I had the pleasure of attending Douglas Crockford's "JavaScript: The Good Parts" presentation at The Rich Web Experience held in the Washington D.C. area. The presentation was excellent and provided real insight into JavaScript's strengths and weakness.

In a nutshell, the presentation and the book, JavaScript: The Good Parts, explains how powerful JavaScript is as a programming language but also where poor language design can have an adverse impact on applications. Douglas Crockford (most famous for creating JSON) maintains that by using a subset of JavaScript developers can leverage the power of the programming language - which is really very flexible - without having to deal with it's poor language features.

Douglas has also developed a program, JSLint, which can analyze your JavaScript to ensure that it uses only the subset of features recommended in his presentation and book. I've heard about JSLint for a couple of years but I never really understood its purpose until now.

It's my most sincere wish that Ajax developers would stick to the subset of features Douglas Crockford advocates using. I was disappointed to hear that only YUI will pass a JSLint test - the other Ajax frameworks use many of the features Douglas calls "the bad parts" of JavaScript. I’ve only started reading the book but if its half has good as the presentation - he is a great presenter - it will be excellent.

Read more from Richard Monson-Haefel.