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How do I turn on JavaScript support?

Are there any solutions for running JavaScript on the server to render data for clients with poor support?

  • I'd like to use JavaScript on the client to generate interactive SVG.  But some clients (IE) don't support that so I'd also like a fallback that generates a basic static display using the same code running on the server.  I suspect I'm not the first to think of this, so does any support already exist?  The last thing I am aware of was the "DOM on the server" blog post/hack using, I think, Node.js.

  • Answer:

    Raphael.js can render SVG paths in IE. It translates them to VML.

Rick Branson at Quora Visit the source

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If you want to try Javascript on the server side, evaluate the following: http://github.com/thatcher/rhino-for-webapps This uses Rhino Javascript engine with env.js, which implements browser's window object in javascript. It also supports jquery, so if you are using it, you don't have to change much. I opted for this instead of node.js, because I wanted to have something that can run inside a servlet container as opposed to a standalone service. I tried Ringo.js and Myna.js too. It was a little challenging to get Ringo working on Tomcat and Myna just didn't work. This had no learning curve and worked out of the box. There is very little Java code (in the form of servlets), which was easy to understand, so I can fix something or add features, if need be. Rhino is much slower than V8, but since I am using it for a specific purpose like you and I cache the results, performance is not big a concern for me.

Raghavendra Kidiyoor

You should check out jsdom: http://github.com/tmpvar/jsdom Its (so far) DOM Level 1 for the javascript server. I use it with Node.js but its CommonJS so any (ES5) CommonJS platform should work. I've been working with it for a few weeks now, working on a real-time data-bound DOM-on-the-server concept, and it's been quite satisfactory. jQuery runs on it, and if you use jQuery you can actually get event bubbling for free, which impressed me.

Evan Q Jones

Node.js (http://nodejs.org/) can run Javascript server-side and has a ton of supported modules (http://github.com/ry/node/wiki/modules). Most helpful for your case is jsdom (http://github.com/tmpvar/jsdom) and the Graphics modules (http://github.com/ry/node/wiki/modules#graphics).

Pras Sarkar

If the the question is genuinely about servers rendering javascript on behalf of impoverished clients, there are some direct answers already.  If the question is actually about how to deal with SVG on browsers without a good SVG implementation, it's probably best to use some fallback on the client that renders the SVG using Flash or VML in IE.  Some examples: svgweb   http://code.google.com/p/svgweb/ canvg http://code.google.com/p/canvg/ see http://www.svgopen.org/2010/papers/62-From_SVG_to_Canvas_and_Back/ for more options

Shawn O'Connor

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