How to roll out your own Javascript API with V8

http://syskall.com/how-to-roll-out-your-own-javascript-api-with

by olalonde • 15 years ago

57 8 15 years ago

syskall.com

olalonde• 15 years ago

I've recently ported the code to Node.js. I'll write about that whenever I have some time.

https://github.com/olalonde/node-notify

Also available through NPM:

    npm install notify

pmjordan3• 15 years ago

Looks nice! I recently used node to add a web interface to a C++ app myself and got annoyed with the amount of boilerplate code required for passing function arguments (type checking, unboxing, boxing return values) so I started a mechanism for automating it:

https://github.com/pmj/node-method-wrapper

It too is still work in progress, but it works pretty well so far. Note that it currently superficially relies on some node-specific extensions, though they should be pretty easy to remove, in order to use it with V8 alone.

palish2• 15 years ago

This is epic. Thank you!

Offtopic: I have always wanted a tutorial for "Here is how to embed WebKit into your C++ application" (to make your own toy web browser). I realize rendering a webpage is only one very tiny component of a browser, but it's such an interesting one that I wish someone would put together a tutorial on how to do that.

pmjordan3• 15 years ago

For embedding a web page display, you're probably best off looking at Webkit/Gecko wrappers for whatever UI toolkit you're using. Getting an image out of the renderer itself is one thing, but tying it into the surrounding windowing environment (using the platform's native widgets, responding to input, etc.) is less trivial. Fortunately, this work has usually already been done for you, and you'll find toolkit-specific documentation on embedding.

For example, for WebKit there is Cocoa/Carbon integration[1], Cocoa Touch integration [2], KDE & Qt integration [3], GTK [4], etc. You can probably find others very easily, likewise for Gecko.

[1] http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/Cocoa/...

[2] http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#documentation/uikit/...

[3] http://api.kde.org/4.5-api/kdelibs-apidocs/kdewebkit/html/in...

[4] http://webkitgtk.org/

palish2• 15 years ago

Thanks for the info. However, what I really want is a simple "here is how to render a webpage with webkit" tutorial.

(FYI I would be using .NET WinForms, so I doubt there's much open-source love.)

vr• 15 years ago

Tip: to make V8 startup and context creation significantly faster add 'snapshot=on' to your scons command line. This serializes the default heap during compilation and quickly deserializes it on startup later.

How to roll out your own Javascript API with V8

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