Javascript is getting very fast through some optimizations. I mean, as fast as C, which is the fastest you can get for a non-assembly language. Firefox 3.1 will ship with this optimized javascript engine: TraceMonkey.

Paul Graham’s prophesy that web-based applications though slow now, will win at the end when javascript runs at the speed of C, may be coming true

Meanwhile hordes of developers are busy porting their web applications (written in Javascript) into Objective-C (iPhone) and Java (Android).

Why? Because you cannot access the native APIs on these platforms from javascript.

But then all we need is a way to call the native methods on the iPhone and Android from Javascript. And this is already happening at the grassroots level for iPhone as PhoneGap. And the new Mobile Safari DOM model has events for touch/gesture manipulation from javascript. But of course Mobile Safari javascript engine is very slow today, so handling gestures using javascript only works on the emulator. So we are working on our iPhone and Android applications as we speak

But I expect this ‘porting web-applications to native smart phones’ to be a transitory phase. Eventually, to use Facebook, you will just go to facebook.com on your smart phone and will not have to install some application from some ’store’.