Subj : Re: A plea to the Open Sourcerors To : netscape.public.mozilla.jseng From : ajmayo@my-deja.com (Andrew Mayo) Date : Tue Feb 03 2004 03:48 am Shanti Rao wrote in message news:... > If you only need Windows, use my JSDB shell (search google), though it's > overkill for what you're doing. > > Contrary to Andrew's initial impression, a JS shell is insufficiently > ubiquitous to be a killer app. At least, nobody's beating down MY door. I've > found it difficult to convince people, including techies, that JS is a real > language and not just for web browsers. Imagine the marketing campaign: > [snip] > > In a month or two, we're going to start making JSDB cross-platform and > open-source. Let me know if you'd like to help port it. Even better would be > if someone wrote a remote debugging interface for Venkman. Robert wrote some > notes on what's needed in n.p.m.jsdebugger. > > Shanti Shanti, I think JSDB is one of the most amazing and important things I've seen for a very long time, and I would be very happy to assist with your plans to Open Source it. I have already compiled and built SeaMonkey and gotten the optional file object working, so I have a reasonable familiarity with the engine itself. As for Javascript and JSDB, here's my marketing campaign 1. Javascript has proper structured exception handling. This is a big win over Perl. 2. Javascript's syntax is lean but powerful; object prototypes are an elegant concept and things like array handling etc. are well-conceived. 3. Javascript allows you to write largely platform-neutral code for handling tasks like installing upgraded software/data files etc. and have proper error handling and recovery. 4. JSDB's footprint is very very small; useful when you are trying to do something over a dialup line. Also the language is compact, making scripts small in size. 5. Javascript is well standardised via ECMA and the language is mature and stable. 6. I personally find Javascript an exceptionally fluid and powerful development tool. It would benefit from mandatory variable declaration, I agree, but this is not a major nuisance. Through objects you can emulate structured data types and pretty much anything you might want to do. 7. I don't care that my Javascript source is effectively made public. Source code has no value. In any case, the application is for staged upgrades across a network; the source is in most cases trivial. Looking at JSDB, by the way, it's not overkill. No, I could use all the extra features e.g database access, I just hadn't imagined someone had done all this till I found JSDB (hence, I didn't ask for it!) It really *is* a killer app. Just because you're ahead of your time doesn't mean at some point people won't suddenly realize how useful a general-purpose, lightweight scripting environment is. Just give 'em time. I think JSDB's extensions should get integrated with SeaMonkey to augment and probably replace the existing rather rudimentary objects (e.g File) provided with SeaMonkey. But, anyway, let's see how it goes. Meanwhile, I did email raosoft to enquire about JSDB source; if I can get a copy, I'd be enormously grateful (I already have the SeaMonkey source, of course, which I assume you did not need to modify). If you catch that email, you'll have my return address here at work, please don't hesitate to contact me directly, if you wish. .