gecko-dev/js/rhino/docs/history.html
nboyd%atg.com 711c087f8e Massive reconfiguration of the cvs directory structure:
mozilla/js/rhino/org is now distributed between
mozilla/js/rhino/src and mozilla/js/rhino/toolsrc.
The build.xml has been split in three.
Docs now live in the project directory.

These changes mean that the cvs directories mirror the distribution and thus a distribution
will build the same way as a cvs build.
2001-04-24 20:31:31 +00:00

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HTML

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