Programming

J4P5: Javascript For PHP5

    Harry Fuecks
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    Need a distraction? Check out J4P5;

    J4P5 is a JavaScript interpreter written in PHP 5, that allows to run untrusted scripts in a sandbox on your server. It aims to implement most of Ecma-262 3d edition.

    I kid you not. In fact this looks like a pretty serious attempt. You’ll need to download and run yourself. There’s grammar rules for Javascript in there and a Javascript runtime written in PHP. It passes the “it works” test – the examples run straight out of $ unzip. Looking at what it does and the TODO list, aside from the Unicode issue strikes me J4P5 is already more than 50% of the way there.

    Aside from novelty, one real world use might be an extension to SimpleTest’s web testing capabilities. With a little work there’s also potential to create an awesome Javascript source compressor – the lexing patterns are all there.

    Need yet more distraction? Try metaphp from which J4P5 got it’s parser generator. Quite what metaphp was (is?) trying to achieve I’m not sure – seems to be attempting to build a higher level language on top of PHP with some ORM and functional programming in there for good measure (the FP stuff in the download is pretty interesting). Anyway – it produced a parser generator good enough implement a Javascript parser.

    Anyone for R4P5? ;)