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Friday, July 18, 2008

Former Life and Birth of Jangaroo

Today, CoreMedia released a first version of the Jangaroo language and tools as Open Source. This was a wonderful moment for me, because this little project has a long history and played an important underpart in my professional life at CoreMedia over the last years. Please read about it, download, apply, spread the word! Be prepared to develop JavaScript like you never did before! The new Web site should offer you everything for a quick start. If not, feel free to ask! In this first blog post, however, you are going to hear Jangaroo's story, which covers its birth, coming of age, and reincarnation, if you want.
Trying Not to Be Eclectic
When in 2003, I had my first deeper dive into JavaScript, I never had thought it would become a passion. As most Java developers, I despised the style of eclectic programming that was then common among JavaScript hackers: To implement some requirement, they didn't use frameworks or libraries, but grabbed code snippets from other Web pages or forums and somehow assembled them to make them work on their Web pages. My impression was that it is hardly possible to implement serious business in such a patchwork language. But I had to, since a new Web application for CMS content entry waited to be designed and implemented.
Patching a Patchwork Language
My colleague Andreas Gawecki surely agreed on that and decided that, before even starting to dirty our hands on pure JavaScript, we needed a tool to transfer at least some of the amenities of Java to the JavaScript world. But because that was in the days before the Web 2.0 hype and the JavaScript Renaissance, there was no such tool. If you know Andreas, you may be able to imagine what happened: Within a week or so, he had gone through the JavaScript 2 / ECMAScript 4 standard proposals and came up with a compiler that could translate a subset of JavaScript 2 language features to JavaScript 1.x! Of course, Andreas had done research on how classes are usually simulated in JavaScript, and of course he had implemented those JS2-features a Java developer would need most desperately when having to program in JavaScript. I was one of his first Guinea Pigs, and also his primary sparring partner for the language. We started developing tons of JavaScript 2 code, because there were not even JavaScript 1 frameworks available, and we had to do all the cross-browser compatibility code ourselves. Andreas even implemented a Rich Text Editor that had features like table editing that were rare in 2003 - and all that using the JavaScript 2 subset and his compiler.
One Thing Leads to Another
This first shot of the compiler was simply named jscc (JavaScript Class Compiler), and the source file extension was .jsc, so the language was also called JSC. Soon, more tools and libraries followed: Holger Tewis implemented a javadoc-counterpart, naturally called jscdoc, that tricked Java doclets into generating HTML API documentation for JSC programs. I did a port of JsUnit to JSC, needless to say called JscUnit, in about two days (and of course its self-tests were green then). We experimented with writing IDE plug-ins for the unfinished language. Having learned from the WebEditor, we implemented another UI framework, which we so far only used for popping up a context menu on preview Web pages to let the user invoke content-related actions (sounds a bit like breaking a fly on the wheel, doesn't it?).
I loved working with JSC, but to be honest it had some serious drawbacks:
  • There was no real IDE support.
  • No type checker, types are just remarks used for API documentation.
  • Bugs and request were not fairly tracked and never really tackled.
  • No class dependencies or automatic class loading: each class file had to be listed, and even in the right sequence before all its depending classes.
Worst, there was almost no documentation and the build process was tied to our primary product. JSC was suffering the typical fate of an internal development tool that had no (paying) customer, although a lot of value or at least potential. At that time, our company grew, and even other projects in the very same company did not use JSC for their JavaScript development. I felt there was something going wrong.
Time for a Change
CoreMedia went through some changes, which opened up new possiblities. We evolved to a learning company, where all members are given time for "peer group" work, i.e. work in small groups of people who pursue a common goal and handle a topic of individual choice. Luckily, I found fellows who were, like me, interested in reanimating JSC. The new spirit and transparency of our company was the perfect breeding ground for the idea to release JSC to the public, as Open Source. It was the perfect candidate:
  • En vogue topic.
  • Focussed, general purpose tool.
  • Not too big to handle.
  • Nothing anyone would want to sell: development tools are hard to sell, anyway, and these are not our company's focus.
  • We had to document and clean up, anyway, so hardly any additional cost.
The main goal of the peer group, consisting of Andreas Gawecki, Olaf Kummer, Matthias Buse, Mark Michaelis, and myself, was to prepare a decision memo convincing CoreMedia to spend resources on our first real Open Source project.
At that time, JavaScript really enjoyed a renaissance and AJAX was a hype. Interesting new articles about JavaScript mushroomed and inspired me to create a new JSC runtime supporting features like private and protected members, lazy class initializing, and even better readable compiled code. After several iterations, we decided to skip "really private" and protected members for performance reasons, but nevertheless found a solution that does the job to avoid unexpected name clashes. We also updated the language syntax to the latest standard proposals. Suddenly, IDEs started to support ActionScript 3, which is also an ECMAScript 4 language, so we could benefit from that, too.
We were overcoming most disadvantages of JSC. In other words, we had even more to offer than what we had used successfully as an internal tool for years.
The peer-group found that JSC needed a proper name: it should be Web-2.0-ish, cool, foolish, looney (add your favorite adjectives containing oo-s), and artificial, so that we could still grab the domain, the blogger subdomain (sic!), the user ID for community xyz, and so on. All our peer groups have rather silly animal names, and we were True Kangaroo. Replacing the first letter by a JavaScript J and keeping the popular oo-s finally led to Jangaroo. I guess the cool name must have been the critical factor when CoreMedia decided to give us a go.
Walking the Talk
In the execution phase, Masiar Bostanipoor (Web site) and Dennis Homann (build infrastructure, tutorial) joined the team. Andreas and Olaf rounded off compiler (now coherently called jooc) and runtime (where I helped a bit). Olaf wrote most of the language and compiler documentation. Kudos to numerous CoreMedians who helped us with the project, in no particular order and surely not complete: Thomas Stegmann, Gunnar Klauberg, Uli Henningsen, Tobias Baier, Jan Brauer, Carsten Böttcher, Stefanie Wegener, and Christian Pesch.
We used the project time CoreMedia granted us mainly to come up with a stable infrastructure and an appealing presentation (at least we hope so), not to create more tools. We got the domain jangaroo.net, created a Web home for Jangaroo, started this blog, wrote documentation, set up a proper build process involving a Maven repository, cared about license issues (German license jurisdiction is a nightmare!), and so on. Of course, some infrastructure is still missing, most importantly a forum and a bug tracker -- we are working on that, please bear with us! Until then, please comment in this blog for public discussions, and e-mail for direct communication. We also have a twitter user Jangaroo, feel free to follow if you like! Many of the tools and libraries mentioned here may follow jooc, so stay tuned!
I hope you have enjoyed hearing about Jangaroo's first life as JSC and its rebirth as an Open Source project. What I described is just the way I personally remember and feel about things. In the future, be prepared to find a bit more technological facts in my postings...