For the foreseeable future my professional life will involve a lot of messing around with browser scripting and browser simulators. Recently, I got interested in the javascript engines created by the folks at Mozilla. Turns out there is not one but two seperate engines: one called SpiderMonkey that's written in C (and used in the actual Mozilla-based browsers) and one written in Java called Rhino (used by HttpUnit among other projects).
Building SpiderMonkey on my Mac turned out to be very easy but since I couldn't find any up-to-date instructions (the README says to use CodeWarrior) I figured I'd write up a simple walkthrough.
-
First, download
the source files. I grabbed the only non-Rhino file I could
find which happened to be
js-1.5.tar.gz - Unzip/untar the file you just downloaded
-
Fire up Terminal.app and cd your way into the
/srcdirectory within the directory you just un-tarred. make -f Makefile.ref-
In a few minutes you should have a sub-directory called
Darwin_DBG.OBJ -
Within that there's an executable called
jswhich is the standalone javascript interpreter.
That's pretty much it. I moved the executable to /usr/local/bin
but of course that's optional. You can create javascript files and run them
using the js command and they just work. The one issue I haven't been
able to figure out is why I can't create XmlHttpRequest objects like so
var ro = new XMLHttpRequest();.
If anyone can figure that out I'd love to know what else I need to be doing.
update
I feel stupid. Of course the javascript interpreter won’t have any way to make XMLHttpRequests. All sorts of browser magic is going on in the background to make that shit happen. The network connection is the least of it. When you make an Ajax request it looks to the server just like a normal page request, complete with cookies and everything.
update 2 Feb 2007
You might want to check out this page to get a feel for what you can do in the js interpreter.
Also looks like they updated the spidermonkey tar-ball to 1.6. Here’s a page that includes the new features in 1.6. I’m a fan of the new functional constructs like map() filter() and reduce().
Once you have the interpreter up and running, try this...[1,2,3].map(function (a) { return a*2; });
4 comments:
Thanks for the post. I had just read through a javascript introduction geared towards programmers, and saw that the language wasn't actually too bad -- somewhere inbetween python and lisp.
So, I wanted an interpreter to play with in REPL style, and your build tips for getting seamonkey up and running did the trick.
And I'm sure you figured out by now that the XMLHTTPRequest objects are glued into the interpreter by the browser core -- the interpreter itself doesn't offer that sort of functionality. Plugged in using the Seamonkey extension API.
Actually, I didn't figure out that the XMLHTTPRequest object was glued into the interpreter via the browser but it makes total sense considering all the stuff that goes on behind the scenes when the request is actually made (such as sending cookies, handling redirects and such). Anyway, thanks for the post.
Thanks for the directions to install
:)
Using macports you would install it by just typing:
sudo port install spidermonkey
http://spidermonkey.darwinports.com/
It worked perfectly here.
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