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:

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

    Sean

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  2. 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.

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