It seems every Perl hacker I spend any more than five minutes with these days is neck deep in JavaScript. Pal David Wheeler has been bending my ear about his port of Perl’s Test::Harness to a JS Test.Simple for some weeks now. Michael Schwern on a recent visit toted not a small number of pounds of JavaScript tomes about with him. I’m not quite sure what the tie is, quite frankly. It’s not simply that JavaScript is on the rise in general amongst scripters and non: there’s something about innate messiness, ubiquity, and hidden powers that just appeals to those who use Perl;
Now comes JSAN, the JavaScript Archive Network, describing itself as a “comprehensive resource for Open Source JavaScript libraries and software” or “CPAN”.replace(/CP/, “JS”). As the name suggests, it is driven by a band of Perlites, led by Casey West.
As we suspected and found in building our CodeZoo site–of Java components, in our case–simply knowing that someone has written something that’ll make your coding life that much easier is a trick in itself. And a valuable one at that.
The most interesting find in the archive thus far has to be JSAN library itself, allowing scripters to import rather than <script src="... other libraries:
// Or in a library.
try {
JSAN.use('Some.Library');
} catch (e) {
alert("Requires JSAN");
}
Congrats to Casey et al. I look forward to watching and using JSAN as it grows.