JE, version 0.013

JE is a pure-Perl ECMAScript (JavaScript) engine. Here are some of its
advantages:

    - Easy to install (no C compiler necessary)
    - Compatible with Data::Dump::Streamer, so the runtime environment
      can be serialised
    - The parser can be extended/customised to support extra (or
      fewer) language features (not yet complete)
    - All JavaScript datatypes can be manipulated directly from Perl
      (they all have overloaded operators)

JE's greatest weakness is that it's slow (well, what did you expect?).

This is still an alpha release. The core objects are not yet complete,
but as long as you don't need dates or regular expressions,  this mod-
ule is actually usable.

If  you have the time and the interest,  please experiment with this
module. If you have any ideas as to how the API could be improved or
reworked, please e-mail me.


CHANGES IN THIS RELEASE

- Added support for 'autoloading' of JavaScript properties
  &JE::Scope::var has been renamed to &JE::Scope::get_var, since it
  was too easily confused with JavaScript's 'var' keyword, which does
  something different.
- Started work on parser customisation

See the 'Changes' file for more.


TO DO

- Make the parser extensible/customisable
- Finish the core object classes
- Add helpful error messages
- Provide a way to bind Perl classes to JS
- Determine some logical way of dealing with locale settings (for
  String.prototype.localeCompare, et al.)
- Write lots and lots and lots of tests, at the same time fixing all
  the bugs they bring to light.
- Make tainted JS code run safely
- Deal with circular references somehow
- Autoload built-in JS properties
- Optimise JS functions by turning them into Perl subs (but run bench-
  marks first to see whether this would actually speed things up) (I'm
  having second thoughts about this one)


INSTALLATION

The easiest way to install this module is to use the CPAN module or
the cpan script:

    [sudo] perl -MCPAN -e "install JE"

    [sudo] cpan
    cpan> install JE

Or you can use the following:

    perl Makefile.PL
    make
    make test
    [sudo] make install


DEPENDENCIES

This module requires Perl 5.8.0 or later.

Later it will probably require Unicode::Collate and Date::Parse.


DOCUMENTATION

After installing, you can find documentation for this module with the 
perldoc command.

    perldoc JE

Or try using man (it's faster, in my experience):

    man JE


ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thanks to Max Maischein [ webmaster  corion net ] for letting me use
his tests,

to Andy Armstrong [ andy        hexten net ] and
   Yair Lenga     [ yair lenga  gmail com  ] for their suggestions,

and to the CPAN Testers for their helpful bug reports.


COPYRIGHT AND LICENCE

Copyright (C) 2007 Father Chrysostomos

This program is free software; you may redistribute it and/or modify
it under the same terms as perl.