Still Waiting: The Story of Two Anticipated But Absent JavaScript Projects Pt 2

Jun 13, 2009 by Peter Newhook    Comments Off    Posted under: Geek

In my previous post I bemoaned the languishing existence of Managed Jscript. Since then I’ve come across this thread on the DLR Codeplex project.  So essentially, Jscript on the DLR is pretty much dead in the water, which is a shame. I really do like the .Net platform and I want to write code in ECMAScript for platforms other than the browser.

However, Managed Jscript was far from the only option to get into non-browser JavaScript. Once again, the good people of the Mozilla Foundation have come to the rescue of JavaScript by giving us Rhino. For those of you that don’t know, Rhino is a JavaScript engine compliant to ECMAScript X.X. But the key is the whole thing is written in Java. That means that you can import Java packages, just as easily as you could use other JavaScript libraries. With the wealth of Java libraries out there, it’s quickly obvious this is a good thing.

My primary interest in Managed JScriptis in using JavaScript on the server side. I don’t want to use more than one language if I don’t have to between the browser and server, but up until this point JavaScript has not had a strong enough standard library because of the security sandbox. But with Rhino, all of a sudden Java’s full ecosystem became available. Now the only thing holding me back was a robust web-framework.

‘But why not just build your own?’ you ask. Because, primarily, I’m not that good. I have a degree in business, not computer science. I enjoy the technical parts of my job, but at my core I’m far more strategy minded than technology. I want as easy an entry as possible. I know a bit of JavaScript, I want to play with JavaScript, not PHP/Python/Ruby (see above comment about using one language).

In my search for a server side JavaScript (SSJS) framework I came across a post by Steve Yegge  and a follow up interview with him about his experimental port of Ruby on Rails to JavaScript, using Rhino as the JS engine. To be clear, I’ve never touched Ruby, but when every developer and their dog is jumping on the Rails bandwagon, you know it’s got something special.

So I waited with bated breath. When would Google give this lowly engineer the right to open source his code and release it to the world. There seemed to be considerable buzz about it so it must be happening soon.

But it did not happen soon. But surely something this clever and innovative will be released eventually. It must, right?

Well maybe not, we’re now two years since that original announcement and nothing has happened. Google didn’t announce a brand new framework to accompany it’s Java App Engine. Steve hasn’t made much direct mention about this since last year at Google I/O.

Sadly, we may be experiencing Duke Nukem Forever syndrome. This is when a project is supposed to be released, but for one reason or another never is. Perhaps it is time to move on. I’ve started looking at Helma (NG), a very cool framework that brings Rhino to the server for the same purpose.

Now this is a very different situation than Microsoft announcing Managed JScript only to decide against it a year later. This is one very bright engineer making a point on how flexible a language is then suggesting a possibility of releasing it open sourced

However, there is the commonality of two very large corporations that have cool JavaScript projects that may never come to completion because there aren’t the resources to finish it. And open souring doesn’t appear to be an option because both projects utilize proprietary systems.

Why am I writing this? Partly out of frustration/disappointment that these projects have not (yet) seen the light of day. Partly because I want to make sure that anyone with a Google Alert for Managed JScript or Rhino Not/On Rails knows they’re not alone.