Wednesday, March 16, 2011

JTalk and JSTalk

When I first heard about JTalk (Smalltalk on JavaScript in a browser) I immediately thought about using it to run a Smalltalk not only on JavaScript but also on the java virtual machine (by using JavaScript as a vehicle and Rhino from Mozilla as the engine to run it).

I played with Rhino in the past ... it's a simple JAR you can use to integrate JavaScript into Java applications and since JTalk is only a few kB in size it should be easy to bootstrap a Smalltalk on top of JavaScript on top of Rhino on top of JVM ...

Performance would be bad ... but it would be fun.

Looks like Thiago Silva already had a similar idea - not really like a Smalltalk, but with similar tools like Smalltalk (like class browser) to ease JavaScript development. This one is called JSTalk (hence the additional name) and can be found here.

2 comments:

Sean DeNigris said...

James Ladd's Redline Smalltalk runs on the JVM and seems to be coming along nicely. Have you checked it out?

Sean

Stefan Krecher said...

Running Smalltalk via Rhino in a JVM was my first thought too! So i set-up the jtalk-server project: http://jtalk-server.appspot.com/ there you can save your Smalltalk-Code to a DB (see the announcement on my blog: http://krecher.com/2011/05/smalltalk-java-jtalk-server.html )

Today i announced that the execution of smalltalk-code on the server-side via Rhino is possible: http://krecher.com/2011/05/remoterunner-for-jtalk-server.html

BTW: i tried redline but it seems not to be usable at the moment.