SLIME: JavaScript with Java and more

What is SLIME?

The SLIME project provides tools for JavaScript development on several platforms:

• Writing Java-enabled JavaScript scripts via the jsh scripting environment
• Writing JavaScript servlets for Java servlet containers (Tomcat, Jetty, etc.)
• Writing front-end code: Chrome, Firefox, Safari
• (requires repair) Using JXA, the macOS JavaScript automation framework

The Java-based environments support Mozilla Rhino and OpenJDK Nashorn, including standalone Nashorn for JDK 15 and up. GraalJS support is under development.

Getting started: run a jsh script without installing anything

The following script runs the master version of the shell remotely and runs the remotely-hosted jrunscript/jsh/test/jsh-data.jsh.js script which emits information about the executed shell:

Using curl (installed on macOS)

curl -v -L https://raw.githubusercontent.com/davidpcaldwell/slime/main/jsh | bash -s https://raw.githubusercontent.com/davidpcaldwell/slime/main/jrunscript/jsh/test/jsh-data.jsh.js

Using wget (installed on many Linux distributions lacking curl)

wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/davidpcaldwell/slime/master/jsh -O - | bash -s https://raw.githubusercontent.com/davidpcaldwell/slime/master/jrunscript/jsh/test/jsh-data.jsh.js

Getting Started: Using SLIME locally

TL;DR

• git clone https://github.com/davidpcaldwell/slime.git; cd slime
• ./jsh jrunscript/jsh/test/jsh-data.jsh.js - runs a sample program emitting information about the installed jsh shell; will bootstrap Java if needed, install a JVM JavaScript engine if needed, and then run the jsh shell using the Java and engine it obtained (or found).
• ./fifty view - runs a server that serves the SLIME documentation and opens an instance of Google Chrome to browse it.

Getting the code

To be able to work with SLIME locally, you'll want to get the code. SLIME is a scripting platform, and so it is written with the philosophy that essentially nothing should be prebuilt; it runs from its own source code. You can clone the source code from GitHub or download it and unzip it.

Executing jsh scripts

At that point, it is ready to use; SLIME is capable of installing its own dependencies (including Java, Node.js, and TypeScript) over the internet.

The top-level jsh script can be used to run scripts. jsh scripts that are top-level scripts and intended to be used as main programs are denoted by the suffix .jsh.js. The example jsh-data.jsh.js invocation above will run a script that will output a JSON data structure describing the shell.

Running the documentation server

The documentation server can be run with the ./fifty view command, which will start a server and Google Chrome browser for displaying SLIME documentation locally.