Best way to integrate Python and JavaScript?

Question

Is it possible to integrate Python and JavaScript? For example, imagine you wanted to be able to define classes in JavaScript and use them from Python (or vice versa). If so, what's the best way? I'm interested not only if this is possible but if anyone has done it within a "serious" project or product.

I'm guessing it would be possible using Jython and Rhino, for one example, but I'm curious whether or not anyone's ever actually done this, and if there are solutions for other platforms (especially CPython).

Answer 1

If your just interested in sharing complex data types between javascript and python, check out jsonpickle. It wraps the standard Python JSON libraries, but has some smarts in serializing and deserializing Python classes and other data types.

Quite a few Google App Engine projects have used this library. Joose and FirePython both incorporate jsonpickle.

Answer 2

Here's something, a Python wrapper around the SeaMonkey Javascript interpreter... http://pypi.python.org/pypi/python-spidermonkey

Answer 3

PyExecJS is able to use each of PyV8, Node, JavaScriptCore, SpiderMonkey, JScript.

>>> import execjs
>>> execjs.eval("'red yellow blue'.split(' ')")
['red', 'yellow', 'blue']
>>> execjs.get().name
'Node.js (V8)'

Answer 4

How about pyjs?

From the above website:

pyjs is a Rich Internet Application (RIA) Development Platform for both Web and Desktop. With pyjs you can write your JavaScript-powered web applications entirely in Python.

Answer 5

Many of these projects mentioned above are dead or dying, lacking activity and interest from author side. Interesting to follow how this area develops.

For the record, in era of plugin based implementations, KDE camp had an attempt to solve this with plugin and non-language specific way and created the Kross https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kross_(software) - in my understanding it never took off even inside the community itself.

During this chicken and egg -problem time, javascript-based implementions are definately way to go. Maybe in the future we seee pure and clean, full Python support natively in browsers.

Answer 6

there are two projects that allow an "obvious" transition between python objects and javascript objects, with "obvious" translations from int or float to Number and str or unicode to String: PyV8 and, as one writer has already mentioned: python-spidermonkey.

there are actually two implementations of pyv8 - the original experiment was by sebastien louisel, and the second one (in active development) is by flier liu.

my interest in these projects has been to link them to pyjamas, a python-to-javascript compiler, to create a JIT python accelerator.

so there is plenty out there - it just depends what you want to do.