Subj : Re: A plea to the Open Sourcerors To : netscape.public.mozilla.jseng From : ajmayo@my-deja.com (Andrew Mayo) Date : Mon Jan 26 2004 01:59 am Martin Honnen wrote in message news:... > Andrew Mayo wrote: > > > Martin Honnen wrote in message news:... > > [snip] > If Windows is your only target then the MS scripting engine for JScript > together with Windows Script Host can be installed without bothering > about IE. Check http://msdn.microsoft.com/scripting for that and ask > further questions about that in one of the MS scripting groups. > Unfortunately Win95 is one of the target platforms and this is not supported directly by the MS Scripting Engine, as far as I can see, I would need to install the complete IE. It sure would be nice to have a decent Open Source implementation of Javascript which included file I/O capabilities and had a fairly small runtime footprint. I would have thought a *lot* of people would have found it useful. Currently, it looks like XPCOM almost does it, but doesn't do file I/O and I get the impression I'm being discouraged to experiment further with Seamonkey's jsshell as this is presumably just a 'proof of concept'. Still, Seamonkey has reasonable documentation on extensibility and I think I'll go back and spelunk through the source and see if I can figure out a way of getting file I/O etc. in there, maybe just by creating some of my own code. There are other alternatives but they all involve oddball scripting languages e.g KIX32 or the Nullsoft Scriptable Installer, and I much prefer Javascript, particularly because it has decent structured exception handling, which is important for scripting applications where you have to guard against the 'unknown unknown'. Besides, we have a lot of code already written and running under MS's Scripting Engine which we want to deploy against a fairly motley assortment of old machines, running, as I said, various flavours of Win9x down to Win95. I am not entirely sure if Mozilla will run cleanly on Win95. (I know, you're wondering, why on earth would I want to do that. Well, I've got a user population of several thousand PCs some of which have been installed for many years and whose owners have no intention of upgrading them on the 'if it aint broke' principle, and we have no control over this, as the customers own their own machines. .