SpiderMonkey

From Free net encyclopedia

This article is about software. For the animal, see Spider monkey.

SpiderMonkey is the code name for the first ever JavaScript engine, written by Brendan Eich at Netscape Communications and later released as open source. SpiderMonkey is now maintained by the Mozilla Foundation.

SpiderMonkey is written in C and contains a compiler, interpreter, decompiler, garbage collector, and standard classes. It does not itself provide host environments such as Document Object Model (DOM).

It is intended to be embedded in other applications that provide host environments for JavaScript. The most popular applications are Mozilla and Mozilla Firefox, as well as notably being the JavaScript engine for Yahoo! Widgets (formerly known as "Konfabulator"). It also functions as an event-based scripting engine for UOX3 (UOX), an Ultima Online emulator. A rather popular and creative utilization of the SpiderMonkey JavaScript engine is the open source Sphere suite of applications primarily intended to aid in the design of Role-playing games.

SpiderMonkey and its sister engine Rhino have implemented support for the ECMAScript for XML (E4X) standard. As of January 2006, it is thought unlikely that Microsoft's JScript will do the same.

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