JE, version 0.058 JE is a pure-Perl ECMAScript (JavaScript) engine. Here are some of its advantages: - Easy to install (no C compiler necessary) - Compatible with Data::Dump::Streamer, so the runtime environment can be serialised - The parser can be extended/customised to support extra (or fewer) language features (not yet complete) - All JavaScript datatypes can be manipulated directly from Perl (they all have overloaded operators) Here are its main weakness: - It's slow (well, what did you expect?). - It uses lots of memory. - It leaks memory (to be fixed). This is still an alpha release, but it fully implements ECMAScript v3, except for a few seldom-used features like -0. If you have the time and the interest, please experiment with this module (or maybe even lend a hand :-). If you have any ideas as to how the API could be improved or reworked, please e-mail me. RECENT CHANGES Unfortunately, I made the mistake of making the previous release ver- sion 0.54 instead of 0.054. I have reset the version on CPAN, so 0.055 is the current version, but if anyone has already upgrade to 0.054, future upgrades will not work from the CPAN shell without ‘force’. Hopefully two weeks was short enough an interval. If this causes prob- lems for anyone, please let me know and I will increase the version to .541 or something similar. 0.058 ----- Bug fix: Remove some debugging code inadvertently included in the pre- vious release. 0.057 ----- Bug fix: The JE::Destroyer class introduced in the previous release was still leaking quite a few objects. Hopefully this has now been fixed. New feature: The JE::Object::Function constructor now allows Perl functions to request the global object in their lists of arguments. 0.056 ----- New feature: An experimental JE::Destroyer class, which, if loaded before any JE objects are created, will track all of them, allowing JE::Destroyer::destroy($je) to destroy all circular references. TO DO - Make the parser extensible/customisable - Add more helpful error messages - Determine some logical way of dealing with locale settings (for String.prototype.localeCompare, et al.) - Finish writing tests - Deal with circular references - Finish making built-in JS properties load lazily - Finish optimising JS compiled code by turning it into Perl code - Other optimisations INSTALLATION The easiest way to install this module is to use the CPAN module or the cpan script: [sudo] perl -MCPAN -e "install JE" [sudo] cpan cpan> install JE Or you can use the following: perl Makefile.PL make make test [sudo] make install PREREQUISITES This module requires perl 5.8.3 or higher and the following modules: • Scalar::Util version 1.14 or later • The TimeDate distribution (more precisely, Time::Zone, Date::Format and Date::Parse) • Encode 2.08 or later For perl versions earlier than 5.9.4 it also requires Tie::RefHash::Weak. Later it will probably require Unicode::Collate. There is a slight incompatibility with perl version 5.8.3. If you try to create a regular expression with invalid modifiers, you will get a warning as well as a SyntaxError. This causes one of the test scripts (parse08-regexps.t) to fail. DOCUMENTATION After installing, you can find documentation for this module with the perldoc command. perldoc JE Or try using man (it's faster, in my experience): man JE ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Thanks to Max Maischein, Kevin Cameron, Chia-liang Kao and Damyan Iva- nov for their contributions, to Andy Armstrong, Yair Lenga, Alex Robinson, Christian Forster, Imre Rad and Craig MacKenna for their suggestions, and to the CPAN Testers for their helpful reports. COPYRIGHT AND LICENCE Copyright (C) 2007-11 Father Chrysostomos This program is free software; you may redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as perl.