home  why?  screenshots  samples/demos  documentation  plugins  download  Subversion  project page

[bottom]

SpiderApe: Beefing up SpiderMonkey

Related Work

Recent news...

Features

• A simplified OO wrapper for "high-level" embedded use: MonkeyWrapper. Clients simply wishing to run JS code from C++, without adding their own JS functions or classes, need to write only a few lines of code do to so.
• Many JS functions (free or class member functions) can be forwarded to native equivalents with one line of code, thanks to templates.
• Ape's Class<> mechanism allows relatively easy creation of new JS-side classes.
• Several built-in JS functions which the core SM lib lacks, like print(), var-checking functions like is_object() and is_defined(). Binding in your own functions via MonkeyWrapper is trivial, and implementing native functions is simplified over "raw SpiderMonkey" by the template-based type conversion framework.
• A type-safe JS-to/from-Native binding system, allowing binding of more than one native object to a JS object (in fact, any number, provided each is of a different native type).
• JS-to/from-Native conversions can be easily acheived in many cases using template-based tricks. This includes pointer/reference conversions for most types.
• A really simple plugins API, allowing the inclusion of new native class/function bindings at runtime.
• A few useful JS classes, like InFile and OutFile (SpiderMonkey does not build with a File class by default), CFile (a different API for working with files), and Signal/Slot classes.
• Two different JS binding for ncurses. One is an OO windows toolkit, a subset of Thomas Dickey's ncurses++ 5.4. The other wraps the lower-level C API. Complete, ncurses applications can be written in JS, prototyped and deployed in record time compared to writing the equivalent curses code in C/C++. The event handling/dispatching capabilities of JS are a great match for ncurses.
• Has an API to allow plugins to add new JS functions and classes when a plugin is opened. For example, we can load the InFile and OutFIle types and functions like rmdir(), chdir(), and mkdir() via JS code: open_dll('iofile','system_funcs')
• Comes with an sqlite3 plugin providing two independent sqlite3 wrapper APIs, one object-oriented and one matching the sqlite3 C API very closely. (As far as i am aware, this is the world's only freely-available sqlite3 binding for Javascript, though i have heard rumor of a commercial product with similar support.)
• The scriptable_base<T> type allows native C++ code to bind objects to native- and JS-space simultaneously, to add functions using either native or script code, and to easily call script-side member functions from native code.
• Comes with a colorful manual, providing an overview of using the API and documenting the various plugins and script-side functions.

Requirements

• SpiderMonkey. Ape comes complete with its own copy of SpiderMonkey, but this is only to ease distribution: it should work with any compatible copy of SpiderMonkey (ours is not hacked at all, only copied). Be aware that building the original SpiderMonkey sources is not trivial, because it is intended to be built during the Mozilla browser's build process. For some good docs on how to get and build the standalone libjs, visit: http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Introduction_to_the_JavaScript_shell.
• While the majority of the code is platform-independent (or portable), the project is very Unix-centric, and thus not all of the support might work under non-Unix platforms. It is developed on Linux machines, and may not build out of the box on other Unices. In particular, the plugins support does not completely work on Win32 platforms due to the "odd" linking requirements of DLLs under Windows.
• A recent C++ compiler with good support for class templates, including partial and full template specializations. gcc 3.2+ are believed to be suitable.
• Various plugins are enabled if the configure script determines that the underlying features are available. These include bindings to 3rd party APIs such as ncurses, readline_cpp, and sqlite3.

JavaScript Resources

• The Mozilla Development Center has the only set of halfway-complete online API docs for the SpiderMonkey API. If you use the SpiderMonkey API, save yourself lots of grief and visit this site.
• libnspr, a library which can be used to compile SpiderMonkey with multi-thread support.
• Douglas Crockford's site is probably the most in-depth site available for advanced JS features. He demonstrates, for example, classical OO-style inheritance and private data members, something most people believe(d) to be impossible in JS.
• Here is another interesting article about implementing classical inheritance in JavaScript.
• Brainjacked.com has some interesting JS snippets.
• JS O Lait provides libraries for all types of weird stuff in JS, including RPC.

Contributors

• stephan beal is the primary author/maintainer.
• Jaap de Wolff's contributions include Windows fixes, threading code, and he developed the Class<> type creation/binding mechanism (which is used extensively by various plugins).

Getting started...

Happy hacking!