Mercurial > pymonkey

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
  "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
  <head>
    <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />

    <title>Pymonkey Documentation &mdash; Pymonkey v0.0.1 documentation</title>
    <link rel="stylesheet" href="_static/default.css" type="text/css" />
    <link rel="stylesheet" href="_static/pygments.css" type="text/css" />
    <script type="text/javascript">
      var DOCUMENTATION_OPTIONS = {
        URL_ROOT:    '',
        VERSION:     '0.0.1',
        COLLAPSE_MODINDEX: false,
        FILE_SUFFIX: '.html',
        HAS_SOURCE:  true
      };
    </script>
    <script type="text/javascript" src="_static/jquery.js"></script>
    <script type="text/javascript" src="_static/doctools.js"></script>
    <link rel="top" title="Pymonkey v0.0.1 documentation" href="" />
    <link rel="next" title="pymonkey — Access SpiderMonkey from Python" href="pymonkey.html" />
  </head>
  <body>
    <div class="related">
      <h3>Navigation</h3>
      <ul>
        <li class="right" style="margin-right: 10px">
          <a href="genindex.html" title="General Index"
             accesskey="I">index</a></li>
        <li class="right" >
          <a href="modindex.html" title="Global Module Index"
             accesskey="M">modules</a> |</li>
        <li class="right" >
          <a href="pymonkey.html" title="pymonkey — Access SpiderMonkey from Python"
             accesskey="N">next</a> |</li>
        <li><a href="">Pymonkey v0.0.1 documentation</a> &raquo;</li>
      </ul>
    </div>

    <div class="document">
      <div class="documentwrapper">
        <div class="bodywrapper">
          <div class="body">

  <div class="section" id="pymonkey-documentation">
<h1>Pymonkey Documentation<a class="headerlink" href="#pymonkey-documentation" title="Permalink to this headline">¶</a></h1>
<p>Pymonkey is a Python C extension module to expose the <a class="reference" href="https://developer.mozilla.org/en/SpiderMonkey">Mozilla
SpiderMonkey</a> engine
to Python.</p>
<ul>
<li class="toctree-l1"><a class="reference" href="pymonkey.html"><tt class="docutils literal"><span class="pre">pymonkey</span></tt> &#8212; Access SpiderMonkey from Python</a></li>
</ul>
<p>Rationale and Goals:</p>
<ul>
<li><p class="first">Python and JS are fairly complementary languages. Python provides
tremendous developer productivity via its dynamic language
features, its vibrant library of third-party client-side code, and
its ease of readability. JavaScript, on the other hand, is widely
known by a vast number of casual programmers due to its
availability in web browsers; it was also envisioned from its
conception to be executed as untrusted code, which gives it a lot
of security features that Python has always lacked.</p>
</li>
<li><p class="first">There&#8217;s an increasing need for being able to run JS on the server
side&#8211;particularly untrusted JS. For instance, being able to
duplicate business logic on the server and client (i.e., browser)
would be very useful. Standards-based solutions like <a class="reference" href="https://wiki.mozilla.org/ServerJS">ServerJS</a> are currently paving the way
in this field. There&#8217;s Java-based solutions like Rhino out there,
but nothing really mature is available for the Python
world. Ideally, Pymonkey should enable a Python programmer to create
a custom sandboxed environment for executing JS code without needing
to write any C.</p>
</li>
<li><p class="first">Pymonkey should have awesome Sphinx documentation with doctests and
all the trappings of a model Python package. Not only should it be
easy for Python programmers to learn how to use the module, but it
should also be easy for them to learn more about how SpiderMonkey
works by reading the documentation and playing around with the code.</p>
</li>
<li><p class="first">Pymonkey needs to have outstanding developer ergonomics. Full
cross-language stack tracebacks should be available, for instance,
and developers should be able to easily debug. Access to memory
profiling facilities in JS-land is a must.</p>
</li>
<li><p class="first">The module uses the Python C API: no SWIG, Pyrex, or other
intermediaries. The obvious disadvantage here is that it means more
C code, but the advantages are that</p>
<ol class="arabic simple">
<li>contributors don&#8217;t need to learn anything other than the
Python and SpiderMonkey C APIs to contribute, and</li>
<li>it means one less dependency, which makes the build process
easier.</li>
</ol>
<p>The module also doesn&#8217;t use ctypes because using the SpiderMonkey
C API requires fairly complex preprocessor macros defined in the
engine&#8217;s header files.</p>
</li>
<li><p class="first">Finally, Atul has never really made a straight Python CAPI module
before, so he wanted to give it a try.</p>
</li>
</ul>
<div class="section" id="building-testing-and-installing">
<h2>Building, Testing, and Installing<a class="headerlink" href="#building-testing-and-installing" title="Permalink to this headline">¶</a></h2>
<p>From the root of your pymonkey repository, run:</p>
<div class="highlight-python"><pre>python setup.py build test</pre>
</div>
<p>This will build the C extension and run its test suite to ensure that
everything works properly.</p>
<p>Then run:</p>
<div class="highlight-python"><pre>sudo python setup.py install</pre>
</div>
<p>Note that if you&#8217;re on Windows, you won&#8217;t need the <tt class="docutils literal"><span class="pre">sudo</span></tt> bit.</p>
</div>
<div class="section" id="challenges">
<h2>Challenges<a class="headerlink" href="#challenges" title="Permalink to this headline">¶</a></h2>
<p>There&#8217;s a number of challenges that need to be resolved before
pymonkey can be really usable. Here&#8217;s some of them.</p>
<p><strong>Garbage Collection</strong></p>
<p>Python&#8217;s garbage collection uses reference counting, whereas
SpiderMonkey&#8217;s is mark-and-sweep. It&#8217;s possible for there to be
situations where there are cycles that exist between SpiderMonkey and
Python objects; this is actually quite similar to the relationship
between XPCOM and JavaScript in the Mozilla platform&#8211;XPCOM uses
reference counting too&#8211;so detecting such cycles will probably involve
creating something akin to <a class="reference" href="https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Interfacing_with_the_XPCOM_cycle_collector">XPCOM&#8217;s cycle collector</a>.</p>
<p>For the time being, however, such cycles can be manually broken via
<a title="pymonkey.Context.clear_object_private" class="reference" href="pymonkey.html#pymonkey.Context.clear_object_private"><tt class="xref docutils literal"><span class="pre">pymonkey.Context.clear_object_private()</span></tt></a> on valid objects and functions.</p>
</div>
<div class="section" id="indices-and-tables">
<h2>Indices and Tables<a class="headerlink" href="#indices-and-tables" title="Permalink to this headline">¶</a></h2>
<ul class="simple">
<li><a class="reference" href="genindex.html"><em>Index</em></a></li>
<li><a class="reference" href="modindex.html"><em>Module Index</em></a></li>
<li><a class="reference" href="search.html"><em>Search Page</em></a></li>
</ul>
</div>
</div>


          </div>
        </div>
      </div>
      <div class="sphinxsidebar">
        <div class="sphinxsidebarwrapper">
            <h3><a href="">Table Of Contents</a></h3>
            <ul>
<li><a class="reference" href="">Pymonkey Documentation</a><ul>
<li><a class="reference" href="#building-testing-and-installing">Building, Testing, and Installing</a></li>
<li><a class="reference" href="#challenges">Challenges</a></li>
<li><a class="reference" href="#indices-and-tables">Indices and Tables</a></li>
</ul>
</li>
</ul>

            <h4>Next topic</h4>
            <p class="topless"><a href="pymonkey.html"
                                  title="next chapter"><tt class="docutils literal"><span class="pre">pymonkey</span></tt> &#8212; Access SpiderMonkey from Python</a></p>
            <h3>This Page</h3>
            <ul class="this-page-menu">
              <li><a href="_sources/index.txt"
                     rel="nofollow">Show Source</a></li>
            </ul>
          <div id="searchbox" style="display: none">
            <h3>Quick search</h3>
              <form class="search" action="search.html" method="get">
                <input type="text" name="q" size="18" />
                <input type="submit" value="Go" />
                <input type="hidden" name="check_keywords" value="yes" />
                <input type="hidden" name="area" value="default" />
              </form>
              <p class="searchtip" style="font-size: 90%">
              Enter search terms or a module, class or function name.
              </p>
          </div>
          <script type="text/javascript">$('#searchbox').show(0);</script>
        </div>
      </div>
      <div class="clearer"></div>
    </div>
    <div class="related">
      <h3>Navigation</h3>
      <ul>
        <li class="right" style="margin-right: 10px">
          <a href="genindex.html" title="General Index"
             >index</a></li>
        <li class="right" >
          <a href="modindex.html" title="Global Module Index"
             >modules</a> |</li>
        <li class="right" >
          <a href="pymonkey.html" title="pymonkey — Access SpiderMonkey from Python"
             >next</a> |</li>
        <li><a href="">Pymonkey v0.0.1 documentation</a> &raquo;</li>
      </ul>
    </div>
    <div class="footer">
      &copy; Copyright 2009, Atul Varma.
      Created using <a href="http://sphinx.pocoo.org/">Sphinx</a> 0.6.2.
    </div>
  </body>
</html>
author	Atul Varma <varmaa@toolness.com>
date	Sun, 16 Aug 2009 12:53:46 -0700
parents	e455f0f00e98
children	699d03db6614