>js
Friday, October 13th, 2006
So I’ve been dabbling with that four letter word at $work to create a hierarchical journal/volume/issue/article browser. Le rails and scriptaculous make it pretty easy indeed.
I figured I’d be a good developer and try to understand what’s actually going on behind the scenes, so I picked up a copy of Ajax in Action [Illustrated] and am working through it.
There is so much hype surrounding Ajax that I had pretty low expectations–but the book is actually very well written and a joy to read. I noticed before diving in that there was an appendix on object-oriented JavaScript. I’ve been around the block enough times to know that JavaScript is actually quite a nice functional language; but apart from DHTML I haven’t really had the opportunity to dabble in it much. This appendix really made it clear how JavaScript is really quite elegant, and for someone who has done object-oriented-programming in Perl the idioms for doing OOP in JavaScript didn’t seem quite that bad.
Anyhow, I quickly wanted to start fiddling around with the language with a JavaScript interpreter so I downloaded Rhino and discovered that you can:
frizz:~/Projects/rhino1_6R4 edsu$ java -jar js.jar
Rhino 1.6 release 4 2006 09 09
js> print("hello world");
hello world
js>
Pretty sweet :-)