Three years on, I can't argue the point: JavaScript now works. Just look around you on the web.

Well, to a point. We can no longer luxuriate in the -- and to be clear, I mean this ironically -- golden age of Internet Explorer 6. We live in a brave new era of increasing browser competition, and that's a good thing. Yes, JavaScript is now mature enough and ubiquitous enough and fast enough to be a viable client programming runtime. But this vibrant browser competition also means there are hundreds of aggravating differences in JavaScript implementations between Opera, Safari, Internet Explorer, and Firefox. And that's just the big four. It is excruciatingly painful to write and test your complex JavaScript code across (n) browsers and (n) operating systems. It'll make you pine for the good old days of HTML 4.0 and CGI.

But now something else is happening, something arguably even more significant than "JavaScript now works". The rise of commonly available JavaScript frameworks means you can write to higher level JavaScript APIs that are guaranteed to work across multiple browsers. These frameworks spackle over the JavaScript implementation differences between browsers, and they've (mostly) done all the ugly grunt work of testing their APIs and validating them against a host of popular browsers and plaforms.

The JavaScript Ninjas have delivered their secret and ultimate weapon: common APIs. They transform working with JavaScript from an unpleasant, write-once-debug-everywhere chore into something that's actually -- dare I say it -- fun.