Random Hacks: Ruby-style metaprogramming in JavaScript (plus a port of RSpec)

"Ruby-style metaprogramming in JavaScript (plus a port of RSpec)" by Eric

Thu, 26 Jul 2007 09:27:57 -0400

meekish: Good question. :-) Now that I think about it, RSpec’s choice of name is pretty good.

Nicolás: I’m working to make ‘def’ quite a bit less clunky, and to make this style of JavaScript programming as pleasant as possible.

There’s some new stuff in Subversion, which will eventually appear as another blog post.

"Ruby-style metaprogramming in JavaScript (plus a port of RSpec)" by meekish

Wed, 25 Jul 2007 23:21:22 -0400

I’m curious why you chose the method name ‘spec’ instead of ‘describe’?

"Ruby-style metaprogramming in JavaScript (plus a port of RSpec)" by Eric

Wed, 04 Jul 2007 19:19:10 -0400

Please feel free to use my RSpec clone in other projects. It should play nicely with Prototype, and if it doesn’t, I’ll be happy to fix it.

I’m also quite happy to fill in many of the missing features. Just let me know what you need!

"Ruby-style metaprogramming in JavaScript (plus a port of RSpec)" by Nicolás Sanguinetti

Tue, 03 Jul 2007 11:59:35 -0400

Gahh, bad copy pasting while editing the comment and an unfortunate click on submit instead of preview (preview should be automatic! or farther away from the submit button!)

"Ruby-style metaprogramming in JavaScript (plus a port of RSpec)" by Nicolás Sanguinetti

Tue, 03 Jul 2007 11:55:24 -0400

I’m not really sure about the ‘def’ to construct classes (although it’s a nice way of adding stuff dynamically, it seems clunky to do that when defining the class).

Other than thatHeh, great stuff! Specially since I was looking to port rspec to javascript :)

As for the spec component, seems nice, I’ll have a closer look at the source and comment on it :)

Have a look at ActiveSupport for JavaScript . It’s a library I’ve uploaded yesterday to port a lot of Ruby’s syntactic sugar to javascript (some of core Ruby, a lot of ActiveSupport).

It works on top of Prototype to add all the magic (only trunk, for now, you need Function.prototype.curry and Function.prototype.methodize for a few aliases and shortcuts).

I intended to write a rspec-clone in JS to test my ActiveSupport (I find the one on script.aculo.us a bit over-restrictive), but might end using yours ;)

"Ruby-style metaprogramming in JavaScript (plus a port of RSpec)" by Eric

Mon, 02 Jul 2007 17:26:51 -0400

I’m glad to hear that you’ll be working on TrimPath again! I’ll be watching your work closely, and looking for opportunities for cross-pollination.

"Ruby-style metaprogramming in JavaScript (plus a port of RSpec)" by Steve Yen

Mon, 02 Jul 2007 12:19:58 -0400

I’ve been recently defrosting the TrimPath codebase, all because of Google Gears which finally gives us a true RDBMS on the client side. I hope to have an updated TrimPath library out soon.

"Ruby-style metaprogramming in JavaScript (plus a port of RSpec)" by Eric

Mon, 02 Jul 2007 07:34:15 -0400

Thanks for the link! RubyJS is an interesting approach. It does all the metaprogramming in Ruby, than introspects the result and compiles it down to JavaScript. Given what I know about the innards the Ruby interpreter, that sounds pretty painful. :-)

I’m hoping that a native JavaScript approach will reduce download size. But I’ll keep an eye on RubyJS!

"Ruby-style metaprogramming in JavaScript (plus a port of RSpec)" by Michael Neumann

Mon, 02 Jul 2007 04:54:25 -0400

While I share everything you say about Javascript, I’m going a different route. Translating Ruby code into Javascript code automatically using RubyJS. All top-level meta-programming tricks that are available in Ruby can be abused…

Ruby-style metaprogramming in JavaScript (plus a port of RSpec)

Eric Kidd — Sun, 01 Jul 2007 19:00:00 -0400

Programming in Ruby makes me happy. It’s a lovable language, with a pleasantly quirky syntax and lots of expressive power.

Programming in JavaScript, on the other hand, frustrates me to no end. JavaScript could be a reasonable language, but it has all sorts of ugly corner cases, and it forces me to roll everything from scratch.

I’ve been trying to make JavaScript a bit more like Ruby. In particular, I want to support Ruby-style metaprogramming in JavaScript. This would make it possible to port over many advanced Ruby libraries.

You can check out the interactive specification, or look at some examples below. If the specification gives you any errors, please post them in the comment thread, and let me know what browser you’re running!