[webkit-dev] Cleaning House

[Per Bothner]

On 04/04/2013 10:21 AM, Oliver Hunt wrote:
> Supporting V8 places a considerable burden on webkit, there are a number of
> large, cumbersome and expensive abstractions required for to support multiple
> JS engines (see the original discussions on the topic from many years ago).

We at Oracle are working on using WebKit with our own JavaScript engine,
Nashorn: http://openjdk.java.net/projects/nashorn/
This is for the WebView component of JavaFX:
http://docs.oracle.com/javafx/2/api/javafx/scene/web/package-summary.html

This is still experimental, and no committed deliverable.  However,
it is obviously preferable in the eat-your-own-dogfood way that we
use our own JavaScript engine, especially once that engine becomes
part of the Java distribution.

This is still in pretty rough shape, but we would find it
unfortunate if if becomes more difficult to build WebKit
with an alternative JavaScript engine.  For the Nashorn "port",
I created a new WebCore/bindings/nashorn directory in
parallel to WebCore/bindings/js and WebCore/bindings/v8.
We generate .java class from the .idl file.  No "JavaScript
classes" are ever created.  Instead Nashorn provides an
on-the-fly bridge to the Java objects.
-- 
	--Per Bothner
per.bothner at oracle.com   per at bothner.com   http://per.bothner.com/