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platforms.md

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Platforms

Narwhal is a standard library and tools for multiple JavaScript engines; each engine has its own "platform" library. Use tusk platform {name} to select an engine, or edit narwhal.conf. The following engines are presently in development:

  • rhino: is the default and most complete platform, based on Mozilla Rhino for Java, used for out-of-the-box functionality.
  • k7: is a v8 based engine, in development by Sébastien Pierre.
  • helma: is based on Rhino with extensions, being developed by Hannes Wallnöefer.
  • xulrunner: is in development for Firefox extensions and XULRunner applications on the Spidermonkey platform by Irakli Gozalishvili, Christoph Dorn, and Zach Carter.
  • jaxer: is an engine based on Mozilla SpiderMonkey, for deploying web pages with both server and client side scripts, being developed by Nathan L Smith.
  • v8cgi: is based on the work of Ondrej Zara, and has not been updated in a long while.
  • default: is a catchall platform that implements modules that can be shared among platforms.
  • browser: will eventually be available for client side loading of modules with various techniques.
  • secure: will eventually be available for dependency injection sandboxed module systems within some other platforms.

Creating new Platform Adapters

We have a template for new platforms at "platforms/template" that you can copy to "platforms/{name}" and fill in the blanks. These consist of:

  1. A shell script at "platforms/{name}/bin/platform-{name}" that executes the interpreter engine of choice and causes it to load a bootstrap script. This script will be loaded by "bin/narwhal" with NARWHAL_HOME set to the Narwhal project directory. This script will be run if NARWHAL_PLATFORM is set to your platform name. You can set NARWHAL_DEFAULT_PLATFORM or NARWHAL_PLATFORM in a "narwhal.conf" in your Narwhal project directory (template provided).

  2. A "thunk", at platforms/{name}/bootstrap.js that evaluates narwhal.js and passes the returned function a preliminary system object with a few required properties (global, evalGlobal, platform, platforms, print, evaluate, prefix, fs.read, and fs.isFile).

  3. Platform implemenations for core modules, such as file and system located in platforms/{name}/lib/. You can implement file-platform instead of file if you implement the subset of the ServerJS file API used by lib/file.js. To get things running, you must implement the file module's list, canonical, mtime, isDirectory, isFile.