New Tool Added to Dojo JavaScript Framework

JavaScriptSearch
Friday, September 1, 2006; 07:02 AM

The official Dojo Toolkit blog announced that the JavaScript development framework has been expanded by the addition of the JS Linker tool.  The new tool's code has been committed to the central Dojo repository.

The Dojo Toolkit is a professional open source development framework, released under the AFL and BSD licenses.

From the Linker’s readme file:

The JavaScript source code can be represented in different levels of granularity. The JavaScript Linker uses the Abstract Syntax Trees (ASTs) representation, which represents the lowest level of detail, to model the source code. One of the main task for this project was to write a JavaCC compatible grammar that strictly follows the ECMA Specification. JavaCC uses this grammar to build a custom parser than can read and analyze the JavaScript source, which in turn, is used to build the JavaScript Linker.

The purpose of JavaScript Linker is to process HTML/JavaScript code base to prepare code for deployment by reducing file size, create source code documentation, obfuscate source code to protect intellectual property, and help gather source code metrics for source code analysis & improvements. The source code modifications can either be made in place by overwriting the input files, or can be saved to a user-specified output directory.

This latest alpha release of the JavaScript Linker uses the new ECMA grammar (supports ECMA-262 Standard 3rd edition). This release is meant for testing purposes only.