So Iā€™ve been dabbling with that four letter word at \(work to create a hierarchical journal/volume/issue/article browser. <a href="http://rubyonrails.org">Le rails</a> and <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20130216003249/http://script.aculo.us/">scriptaculous</a> make it pretty easy indeed.</p> <p>I figured I'd be a good developer and try to understand what's actually going on behind the scenes, so I picked up a copy of <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Ajax-in-Action-Dave-Crane/dp/1932394613">Ajax in Action [Illustrated]</a> and am working through it.</p> <p>There is so much hype surrounding Ajax that I had pretty low expectations--but the book is actually very well written and a joy to read. I noticed before diving in that there was an appendix on object-oriented JavaScript. I've been around the block enough times to know that JavaScript is actually quite a <a href="http://interglacial.com/hoj/hoj.html">nice</a> functional language; but apart from DHTML I haven't really had the opportunity to dabble in it much. This appendix really made it clear how JavaScript is really quite elegant, and for someone who has done object-oriented-programming in Perl the idioms for doing OOP in JavaScript didn't seem quite that bad.</p> <p>Anyhow, I quickly wanted to start fiddling around with the language with a JavaScript interpreter so I downloaded <a href="http://www.mozilla.org/rhino/">Rhino</a> and discovered that you can:</p> <pre> frizz:~/Projects/rhino1_6R4 edsu\) java -jar js.jar Rhino 1.6 release 4 2006 09 09 js> print(ā€œhello worldā€); hello world js>

Pretty sweet :-)