Comments on: Yes Ruby in the Browser, No it won’t take off?

By: ppibburr

ppibburr — Sun, 02 May 2010 01:40:49 +0000

so, i have a webkit in a ruby-gtk2 app. the DOM is exposed and so are events

By: Nathan

Nathan — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 22:24:59 +0000

Well, if anyone’s still interested in this, I’m putting my project of this type into SourceForge over the new few days (project name BrowserScripting). It’s not exclusively a JRuby-centric engine (currently have BeanShell and Pnuts working, JudoScript and JACL in the works).

It has DOM manipulation (including stylsheet manipulation) and the beginnings of HTML events (mouse clicks, etc.)

It currently works fairly well under FireFox and IE – Opera, Safari and Chrome have a few deal-breaking issues I’m trying to work through, and I haven’t been able to test Konqueror at all.

With regards to Sam’s post, Jython is not possible, as it uses real-time bytecode compilation which is expressly blocked (via ClassLoader) by the JVM. Using a signed applet is NOT a solution, as this would open the door to some serious security problems (scripts would have unrestricted access to the user’s PC). The same holds true for Groovy (unfortunately).

As part of this project, I have an ANT build which unpacks the standard JRuby JAR file, removes “unneeded” files and classes (such as file I/O), and re-packages it. By additionally applying Pack200 to the result, the JRuby JAR has been reduced to 1.2MB (as opposed to the nearly 8MB of the original JAR).

If anyone is interested, I will try to keep the SourceForge project updated.

By: mikepk

mikepk — Mon, 23 Jan 2006 21:34:24 +0000

It doesn’t provide everything you’re asking for, but my new javscript library/framework (yajaf.blogspot.com) does incorporate a packaging / dynamic code loader component. I think it’s one of the things that makes mine different and I’m considering opening it up. Alas, I can’t seem to get enough interest in it. I’m looking for interest and feedback from potential users to see if I should finish my developer tool.

By: Gary

Gary — Fri, 20 Jan 2006 00:57:33 +0000

You can get your ruby on in the browser already… to a limited extend. See http://www.kavascript.com.

By: Brian

Brian — Wed, 11 Jan 2006 23:04:01 +0000

Replacing JS with a generic interpreter would be cool. The JVM would be great, but anything that allowed multiple languages to replace JS would work for me.

By: Sam Pullara

Sam Pullara — Wed, 11 Jan 2006 01:48:48 +0000

You would really need something with built in security like the JavaVM. It would be awesome if you had a callback that gave you the DOM for the page and let you manipulate it. You could then use JRuby, JPython, or even just Java at that point. It always surprised me that applets didn’t have this capability…