fbjs – Robert Accettura's Fun With Wordage

John Resig has an interesting blog post on embedded JavaScript. It’s something I’ve been thinking about for a little while.

It would be awesome to see a PHP extension to embed SpiderMonkey into PHP. As far as I’m aware Facebook is the only one that’s taken a step in that direction with FBJS, which uses Mozilla source code. Perhaps that could be a starting point.

Considering the ubiquity of JavaScript, using SpiderMonkey, which is already available for Perl and Python, or Rhino (for Java) would make sense. It would allow for JavaScript to be for logic what XML is for data. In my mind that is nirvana for the web.

XML made our data portable. JavaScript can make our logic portable. Seems practical enough right?

For those who question security, it’s really up to the client to decide if it should parse JS, and what subset it should allow (perhaps no eval()). Having an API based on JS is really no less secure than any other language including one that’s home made. It’s advantage is that it’s used everywhere else and makes your API easier to work with.

This could be cornerstone of Web 3.0. Web 2.0 was largely about shared data and isolated small services. Web 3.0 could be about shared data and shared services.

Facebook today released the code behind their application platform. What that entails:

This release includes the API infrastructure, the FQL parser, the FBML parser, and FBJS, as well as implementations of many common methods and tags. We’ve included samples and some dummy data to help you get started fast.

It’s mostly licensed under Common Public Attribution License (CPAL), with the exception of the FBML stuff, which is MPL. It’s actually Mozilla code, and seems to be based on Firefox 2.0.0.4. I wonder if they plan to upgrade to Firefox 3? Some enhancements that would presumably give would be JavaScript 1.8 support and native JSON encode/decode. Or at least the latest Firefox 2 release… but I digress.

Before releasing their API last year, Facebook bought Parakey, founded by Blake Ross and Joe Hewitt of Firefox fame. I don’t know if this code is actually derived from the unreleased Parakey, or even written by them. For all I know it could have been written by Facebook developers well before they were even acquired. Though if I had to place a bet, I’d guess this is code from Parakey. The code all looks pretty well scrubbed of anything that might give away Facebook secrets.