Re: GNOME Javascript questions and a bit of presentation

[Henri Bergius <henri bergius iki fi>]

Hi,

On Sat, Sep 24, 2011 at 12:54 PM, Eduardo Lima Mitev <elima igalia com> wrote:
> The purpose of this mail is basically to gather the opinion of the
> GNOME javascript community regarding the developer story and the
> relationship with other javascript communities/efforts. I will be
> giving a talk titled "Javascript, the GNOME way" at JSConf.eu [1] next
> weekend.

Cool, that is a good place to raise awareness in GNOME! I will be
there for the Reject.JS event on Thursday, but unfortunately wasn't
able to get a JSConf.eu ticket in time.

> 1) Is there motivation/interest in the GNOME javascript community to
> implement CommonJS [2] API specs?

This would be great.

> Just as an exercise/experiment, I recently started writing a wrapper
> to gjs that would provide CommonJS support. Code is at [4] and only
> 'Modules' (require) is implemented at the moment.

I was experimenting with the same thing in Desktop Summit, but didn't
have time to finish it. Cool to see others working on it :-)

> 2) Do we have an agreement for the long term, about whether gjs or
> seed will finally be "the" engine?

Node.js is becoming the third engine:
https://github.com/creationix/node-gir

The benefit there is that Node obviously has all the CommonJS modules
and other things available, and has quite a large mindshare in the
JavaScript community.

> 3) What is the current state and the plan/roadmap to provide binding
> documentation of GNOME libraries?

There is a bit of discussion on node-gir side of things about how the
GIR APIs should be provided to JavaScript. Some things to consider:

* camelCase or underscores?
* Continuation-Passing Style or Call-Return?

https://github.com/creationix/node-gir/issues/7

It might be good to have some common ground between the different JS
implementations on these.

> Eduardo

/Henri

PS. If you want to show it as a curiosity, here is a simple GTK
example with CoffeeScript:
http://friendpaste.com/4Xs9DD9BFQIY45cZRzygrB

-- 
Henri Bergius
Motorcycle Adventures and Free Software
http://bergie.iki.fi/

Jabber: henri bergius gmail com
Microblogs: @bergie