pete and repete
Still Waiting: The Story of Two Anticipated But Absent JavaScript Projects Pt 1
Posted under: This is the story of two very exciting JavaScript projects that were announced to a minor flurry of activity, and then promptly forgotten about by the people that introcuded them to the world. What makes this interesting is the two, very different sources that these products came from. I am talking about Managed JScript and Rhino on Rails. This post will focus on Managed JScript
Managed JScript is Microsoft’s implementation of JScript (JavaScript/ECMAScript) for the .Net platform. Specifically, Managed JScript will run on the Dynamic Language Runtime (DLR) which has risen to a certain amount of acclaim since IronPython and IronRuby began strutting their stuff. When the DLR was announced, it was bundled with demos of IronPython, IronRuby, and Managed JScript, all for SilverLight. This was an impressive step for Ruby and Python, as these are two languages that hadn’t been able to easily run in the browser. However, JavaScript was born in the browser so this was a smaller step. What I, and I’m sure many other JavaScript users, wanted to see was a way to run desktop and server side applications in JavaScript, using the .Net framework’s tools. It looked like Microsoft may be ready to deliver on this with their inclusion of Managed JScript in a .Net futures release, but that was only a technology preview and not ready for prime time.
So now IronPython is released and making geek blog headlines for being faster than CPython and IronRuby just released 0.5 which can now pretty much run Rails, which is quite the feat. And Managed JScript? Nowhere to be seen, not even a status update.
Now, is it right to blame Microsoft for this? They’ve fully supported the development of the DLR, going as far as to open source the code. There’s even a project on Codeplex, MyJscript, that is intented to be a teaching language to learn how to create a DLR language by implementing JScript. It’s also possible that Microsoft is waiting until ECMAScript5 has been standardized so they won’t have to tack a major update onto the language only months after it has been released. However, because Microsoft has announced plans to eventually release Mnaged JScript, it would be foolish for any programmer to sink time into creating an open source DLR JavaScript. If Microsoft did ever release this fabled language, all that time invested would be wiped out buy what would (hopefully) be a well polished and supported language.
So if you’re interested in JavaScript for .Net there are two options the way I see it:
- Wait until Microsoft releases Managed JScript, which may be never, and will possibly be closed source (notice that Managed was used and not the Iron convention of the other open source languages)
- Create your own implementation called “Managed IronJscript.Net # (Sharp),” that may get trounced by an official release.
JScript.Net is not an options, it’s dead.
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