COMPILING SPIDERMONKEY WITH THE FILE OBJECT

If you find that your build times are intolerably slow, you should consider
using spidermonkey since it's significantly faster than Rhino. However, most
default binaries do not include support for file operations. There are
instructions on Mozilla's website on how to compile spidermonkey with file
support, but they are incomplete and inaccurate. Here's how we did it:

1.) Ensure that you have the Netscape Portable Runtime Environment (nspr)
library and header files. This library provides the prerequisites for file
I/O.

On a Debian-based distribution, the package is probably called libnspr4-dev.
Use aptitude to install it:

sudo aptitude install libnspr4-dev

On a RedHat-based distribution the package is probably called nspr-devel.
Use yum to install it:

sudo yum install nspr-devel

2.) Download and extract the spidermonkey source archive.

mkdir mozilla
cd mozilla
wget http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/js/js-1.7.0.tar.gz
tar xzf js-1.7.0.tar.gz

3.) The spidermonkey Makefile assumes that the include path and lib path are
in a dist directory, so you'll need to correct it. Look for this block in
js/src/Makefile.ref:

ifdef JS_THREADSAFE
DEFINES += -DJS_THREADSAFE
INCLUDES += -I$(DIST)/include/nspr
ifdef USE_MSVC
OTHER_LIBS += $(DIST)/lib/libnspr$(NSPR_LIBSUFFIX).lib
else
OTHER_LIBS += -L$(DIST)/lib -lnspr$(NSPR_LIBSUFFIX)
endif
endif

Change $(DIST) to /usr (that's the default prefix where nspr is installed).

ifdef JS_THREADSAFE
DEFINES += -DJS_THREADSAFE
INCLUDES += -I/usr/include/nspr
ifdef USE_MSVC
OTHER_LIBS += /usr/lib/libnspr$(NSPR_LIBSUFFIX).lib
else
OTHER_LIBS += -L/usr/lib -lnspr$(NSPR_LIBSUFFIX)
endif
endif

Note, on RedHat the include directory for nspr is /usr/include/nspr4. So
change this line:

INCLUDES += -I/usr/include/nspr

to

INCLUDES += -I/usr/include/nspr4


4.) Now, build SpiderMonkey with the following commands:

cd mozilla/js/src
make -f Makefile.ref JS_THREADSAFE=1 JS_HAS_FILE_OBJECT=1

If you incorrectly specify arguments, you'll probably need to run the clean
target and repeat things:

make -f Makefile.ref clean

5.) You should now have a js binary in mozilla/js/src/Linux_All_DBG.OBJ:

./Linux_All_DBG.OBJ/js
js> print("hello world")
print("hello world")
hello world
js> quit()
quit()

6.) Copy that binary into your path and you're good to go.

STARTING A NEW PROJECT

You can setup a new project by using the new_project.sh utility:

tools/new_project.sh PROJECT_BASE_DIR PROJECT_NAME

This program will setup your project with the standard project layout and a
default welcome page. It will also provide you with instructions on how to
build your project and how to run the development webserver.

STARTING A NEW WIDGET OR RPC PACKAGE

Once you've setup your project, you'll want to start creating widget packages and rpc packages. You can use the new_pkg.js utility:

js juice/tools/new_pkg.js [widget|rpc] PKG_NAME

This will create the appropriate stub files for you in the appropriate
directory locations.

COMPILING THE V8 SHELL (DO NOT USE)

Install lib v8 as a shared library.

Now change directories to $JUICE_HOME/ext/tools and run make

make
sudo make install