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46 lines
2.3 KiB
HTML
46 lines
2.3 KiB
HTML
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<!doctype html public "-//w3c//dtd html 4.0 transitional//en">
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<html>
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<head>
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<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
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<meta name="Author" content="Norris Boyd">
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<meta name="GENERATOR" content="Mozilla/4.72 [en]C-NSCP (WinNT; U) [Netscape]">
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<title>Rhino History</title>
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</head>
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<body>
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<center><b><font size=+3>Rhino History</font></b></center>
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<p>Rhino gets its name from the animal on the cover of the <a href="http://www.ora.com/">O'Reilly</a>
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book about JavaScript.
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<p>The Rhino project was started at Netscape in Fall 1997. At the time,
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Netscape was planning to produce a version of Navigator written entirely
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in Java and so it needed an implementation of JavaScript written in Java.
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When Netscape stopped work on "Javagator", as it was called, somehow Rhino
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escaped the axe (rumor had it that the executives "forgot" it existed).
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Since then, a couple of major companies (including Sun) have licensed Rhino
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for use in their products and paid Netscape to do so, allowing us to continue
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work on it. Now Rhino is planned to be part of several server products
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from Netscape as well.
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<p>Originally, Rhino compiled all JavaScript code to Java bytecodes in
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generated classfiles. This produced the best performance (often beating
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the C implementation of JavaScript when run on a JIT), but suffered from
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two faults. First, compilation time was long since generating Java bytecodes
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and loading the generated classes was a heavyweight process. Also, the
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implementation effectively leaked memory since most JVMs don't really collect
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unused classes or the strings that are interned as a result of loading
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a class file.
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<p>So in Fall of 1998, Rhino added an interpretive mode. The classfile
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generation code was moved to an optional, dynamically-loaded package. Compilation
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is faster and when scripts are no longer in use they can be collected like
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any other Java object.
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<p>Rhino was released to mozilla.org in April of 1998. Originally Rhino
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classfile generation had been held back from release. However the licensees
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of Rhino have now agreed to release all of Rhino to open source, including
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class file generation. Since its release to open source, Rhino has found
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a variety of <a href="users.html">uses</a> and an increasing
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number of people have contributed to the code.
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<p>
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<hr WIDTH="100%"><a href="index.html">back to top</a>
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</body>
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</html>
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