Hi all: In the case of most of the scripting languages, we have interactive shells like irb (Ruby), >>> (Python) etc.
The 1.7.0 release of Spider Monkey by Brendan Eich, has a stand alone JavaScript engine with an interactive shell. During the recent Firefox Hackathon session, I emphasised the importance of using JavaScript for accessing XPCOM components and programming in general. While it is true that most of us think of JavaScript in the context of a web page, that is *not* the best way to learn and master the language. It is important to understand that JavaScript supports two programming paradigms ie. procedural and object-oriented. To push that idea further, I downloaded the javascript sources, built them up, downloaded the relevant documentation, converted to PDF and packaged the whole thing as ijs.tar.gz For those of you on x86-32bit, just download (1.3MiB) the archive and open it in the directory of your choice. http://apps.twincling.org/ijs/ijs.tar.gz Run the file 'ijs' as ./ijs in directory and you will have the JavaScript interpreter running for you. To seek help, type 'help();' To exit, type 'quit();' Yes, the parentheses '()' and terminating semi-colon ';' are necessary ! You can directly write code on the shell or you can write the code in .js file and then ask the interpreter to directly run it or load-n-run it for you. eg. ./ijs -f sample.js or ./ijs js> load ('sample.js'); Read the examples and documentation in the doc/ directory. A good place to get started on JavaScript is http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/About_JavaScript Have fun ! thanks Saifi.
