Today, I came up with the idea of “Orto: Java in JavaScript“. Well, it is not “Java to JavaScript”, it is “Java in JavaScript”. It is said that java.lang.Thread is supported. But as there is no downloads available, and it is not open source, so I could not test it.
Supporting Thread programming in JavaScript would be cool. Once I spent some time trying to figure out how to support Thread in Java2Script project, but I failed. But I managed to program execute codes asynchronously by using SWT’s Display#timerExec(int, Runnable) or Display#asyncExec(Runnable) instead. So even though I can not use Thread#sleep, I still can do lots of thread things.
And Orto seems to be in a different way to support Thread, the codes it generated look like these:
case 117:orto246[orto247-2]={high:(~orto246[orto247-2].high)
&0xffffffff,low:(~orto246[orto247-2].low+1)&0xffffffff};
if(orto246[orto247-2].low==0){orto246[orto247-2].high++;
orto246[orto247-2].high&=0xffffffff;
orto246[orto247-2].low=0;
}break;
Compiling to Java code into byte-code like script, and loading and running these scripts in “JVM” should be a way to support all Java things. In my opinions, all locks and threads are re-implemented. Performance should be a problem. I know that there is another project called XML11, which is also trying to compile Java codes into JavaScript byte-code.
And recently, I also noticed that there was a debate about GWT Ext or Ext GWT. You may already know that GWT is about compiling Java to JavaScript and Ext JS is a HTML/CSS+JavaScript based UI library. It is interesting to see people combine these two technologies together. And it is more interesting that putting GWT before Ext JS and putting Ext JS before GWT is two different things. You may want ot read Didier Girard’s discussion for a clear idea.
About 2 years ago, when I started Java2Script project, I had to think about its programming model. At that time, people began to wrap existed JavaScript library in Java way. I called it “JavaScript for Java (JavaScript4Java)”, which is quite different from my “Java to JavaScript (Java2Script)”. So “2″ and “4″ is totally different, right?
In fact, I do know that Java and JavaScript are two different language. The reason that I chose Java as the source and JavaScript as the target is that Java is most beautiful and most used language while JavaScript is a world wide supported language. And I am familiar and love Java language. So I created Java2Script. I do believe that C#-to-JavaScript, Ruby-to-JavaScript or Other-to-JavaScript is not a big deal for me. But I may not have energy to make a similar compiler.
Java and JavaScript may be hotter and hotter. Good to see that more and more people is linking Java and JavaScript together.
