JS.Class 2.0

Ruby
1

Hello list,
Do please forgive me if this is a little too off-topic but I thought
some
folks here might be interested. I recently released version 2.0 of
JS.Class,
my JavaScript library that implements some of Ruby’s OOP features in
JavaScript. It is not a Ruby interpreter; rather it brings various
idioms
found in Ruby OO programs to JavaScript, allowing for classes, modules,
inheritance, metaprogramming hooks, and ports of a few classes in the
Ruby
stdlib amongst other things.

If there’s anybody here who’s into JavaScript I would be thrilled if
they
would give it a try and let me know about any weak spots where it might
deviate from Ruby-like behaviour. This release is the closest to Ruby
I’ve
managed to get so far, and I’d love some help from the Ruby community to
iron out any obscure use cases.

Anyway, without further ado:
http://jsclass.jcoglan.com/

Any help/feedback very welcome indeed.

2

James C. [email protected] writes:

If there’s anybody here who’s into JavaScript I would be thrilled if they
would give it a try and let me know about any weak spots where it might
deviate from Ruby-like behaviour. This release is the closest to Ruby I’ve
managed to get so far, and I’d love some help from the Ruby community to
iron out any obscure use cases.

Anyway, without further ado:
http://jsclass.jcoglan.com/

Any help/feedback very welcome indeed.

Ok, well, first impressions:

  • It seems fairly large for what it appears to do. But I’ve not
    investigated this in depth.

  • There’s no in-line documentation, which is a pain if you’re
    evaluating code.

  • I’m quite certain using constructors as the basis for classes is
    just wrong in javascript. I don’t have the time now to go into this
    in depth. I put some earlier explanations about constructors online
    here:

http://joost.zeekat.nl/constructors-considered-mildly-confusing.html

At the moment I think that any code that’s serious about building
classes in JS should start from something similar to Crockford’s
“begetObject”:

http://javascript.crockford.com/prototypal.html

and forget about constructors all together.

  • I’m not certain that you should even try not to “deviate from
    Ruby-like behaviour”. You’re not writing a ruby library, after all.
3

James C. wrote:

would give it a try and let me know about any weak spots where it might
deviate from Ruby-like behaviour. This release is the closest to Ruby I’ve
managed to get so far, and I’d love some help from the Ruby community to
iron out any obscure use cases.

Anyway, without further ado:
http://jsclass.jcoglan.com/

Any help/feedback very welcome indeed.

That looks pretty complete and well documented.

I am mostly interested in how you implemented Ruby’s meta model
(classes, modules and meta-classes), as that’s the hardest part
at all. Mainly the circular dependency between Class and Object
(a Class in Ruby inherits from Object, and Object is an instance
of Class and as such an instance of itself :).

Note that I wrote RubyJS 1 which is a Ruby to Javascript compiler.
It supports all Ruby constructs (including method_missing) with the
only limitation being that classes and methods are fixed at compile
time, but you can use meta-programming in the pre-compilation stage
(most of the time you will not notice the difference!).

Regards,

Michael