Executing Javascript without a browser?

Question

I am looking into Javascript programming without a browser. I want to run scripts from the Linux or Mac OS X command line, much like we run any other scripting language (ruby, php, perl, python...)

$ javascript my_javascript_code.js

I looked into spider monkey (Mozilla) and v8 (Google), but both of these appear to be embedded.

Is anyone using Javascript as a scripting language to be executed from the command line?

If anyone is curious why I am looking into this, I've been poking around node.js. The performance of node.js makes me wonder if javascript may be a viable scripting language for processing large data.

Answer 1

You may want to check out Rhino.

The Rhino Shell provides a way to run JavaScript scripts in batch mode:

java org.mozilla.javascript.tools.shell.Main my_javascript_code.js [args]

Answer 2

Well there is JavaScript as OSA, an extension that provides JavaScript as an alternative to appleScript. I've been using that about 10 years ago, don't know if it's still working with current OS versions

Answer 3

I found this related question on the topic, but if you want direct links, here they are:

• You can install Rhino as others have pointed out. This post shows an easy way to get it up and running and how to alias a command to invoke it easily
• If you're on a Mac, you can use JavaScriptCore, which invokes WebKit's JavaScript engine. Here's a post on it
• You can use Chome/Google's V8 interpreter as well. Here are instructions
• The JavaScript as OSA is interesting because it lets you (AFAIK) interact with scriptable OS X apps as though you were in AppleScript (without the terrible syntax)

I'm surprised node.js doesn't come with a shell, but I guess it's really more like an epoll/selector-based callback/event-oriented webserver, so perhaps it doesn't need the full JS feature set, but I'm not too familiar with its inner workings.

Since you seem interested in node.js and since it's based on V8, it might be best to follow those instructions on getting a V8 environment set up so you can have a consistent basis for your JavaScript programming (I should hope JSC and V8 are mostly the same, but I'm not sure).

Answer 4

FWIW, node.js comes with a shell, try typing in:

node-repl

once you've installed node.js to see it in action. It's pretty standard to install rlwrap to get it to work nicely.