[Web-SIG] JavaScript libraries

[Donovan Preston]

On May 2, 2005, at 5:47 PM, Peter Hunt wrote:

> Hello everyone,
>
> A long time ago (before the advent of IronPython), I wrote a small  
> Python module that compiled a python file to a JScript.NET file and  
> compiled it. Seeing as JScript and JavaScript are very similar, I  
> bet this could be very helpful. See http://subway.python- 
> hosting.com/attachment/wiki/Py2Js/pyc.2.py for the code.

This is awesome, thank you for posting the link. I had planned on  
doing something similar to this for a long time, for both JavaScript  
and ActionScript (flash bytecode instead of text script). However  
LivePage is just a hobby for me, so I never found time.

> I envision a world where we can write something like:
> <input type="button" onclick="server.onButtonClick()" />
>
> And it will do a server-side RPC to the onButtonClick() method,  
> which could do something like this:
> def onButtonClick(ctx):
>     ctx.document.writeln("Button clicked")
>
> ctx would serve as a magical proxy for method calls back to the  
> client. This would allow seamless integration of JavaScript and  
> Python without even writing a line of JS. What do you think?

Yep, this is almost exactly what LivePage looks like.

def onButtonClick(client):
     client.sendScript("alert('hello world')")


class Foo(LivePage):
     def render_clickable(self, ctx, _):
         return ctx.tag(onclick=handler(onButtonClick))

     docFactory = loaders.htmlstr('<input type="button"  
nevow:render="clickable" />')

I think I like your proposed syntax, with a "server" object in  
javascript; I'll mess around with adding support for something like  
it to LivePage. I'm not sure I like the magical proxy server-side  
interface too much. nevow.livepage.ClientHandle has a nice API which  
provides convenient methods for mutating the client side dom:

set - replace an old node's contents with some new contents
append - append a new node as a child of an old one
prepend - prepend a new node as the first child of an old one
alert - show the user an alert
call - call a client side javascript function with some arguments
sendScript - send arbitrary javascript for execution

Donovan

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