Building Linux Applications With JavaScript

crankymonkey writes "The GNOME desktop environment could soon gain support for building and extending applications with JavaScript thanks to an experimental new project called Seed. Ars Technica has written a detailed tutorial about Seed with several code examples. The article demonstrates how to make a GTK+ application for Linux with JavaScript and explains how Seed could influence the future of GNOME development. In some ways, it's an evolution of the strategy that was pioneered long ago by GNU with embedded Scheme. Ars Technica concludes: 'The availability of a desktop-wide embeddable scripting language for application extension and plugin writing will enable users to add lots of rich new functionality to the environment. As this technology matures and it becomes more tightly integrated with other language frameworks such as Vala, it could change the way that GNOME programmers approach application development. JavaScript could be used as high-level glue for user interface manipulation and rapid prototyping while Vala or C are used for performance-sensitive tasks.'"

Comments

Re:God no!

[pavon]

The main purpose of this project is to enable easy embedding of Javascript into a GNOME application for scripting purposes, on the basis that lots of people know javascript so it makes a good extension language. The fact that you can write entire applications with it is just a (disturbing) side-effect.

But if you really want to frighten yourself notice that these applications are run just like any scripting language in unix - with a shebang header line. So javascript init scripts are now yours to have.

Re:Takes the idea of "open source" to a new level

[Rei]

C++ and javascript aren't mutually exclusive. In fact, I'm checking slashdot right now during a break from debugging a home project that makes use of both of them. I'm quite fond of the mixture of a C++ backend with a javascript frontend that can be used over the web. In this particular case, it's an electric vehicle simulator that lets you specify your vehicle details and plot a route over Google Maps. The frontend uses form POST requests to call the simulator to run the CPU-intensive simulation on the backend (where it has access to many gigs of heightmap data). The backend talks to the frontend by returning javascript function calls with the results asynchronously.

I've done several projects of this nature before. One weakness is that if the backend takes longer than two minutes, the connection gets dropped. Not a problem on this project, but on a web-based Povray interface I did in the past (lets you customize car paint jobs, then renders the car in a variety of scenes), it was. The solution is simply to have the frontend take responsibility for periodically fetching the results from the backend.

All in all, I find it a very nice balance between the cross-platform web-accessible functionality of an HTML/Javascript frontend and the extreme speed of a C++ blackend.