Ringo is a JavaScript platform built on the JVM and optimized for server-side applications. It's based on the Mozilla Rhino JavaScript engine.
It adds a number of features to Rhino that make it suitable for real-world, large-scale application development:
- A fast, auto-reloading, and CommonJS-compliant module loader.
- A rich set of modules covering I/O, logging, development tools and much more.
- Support for blocking and none-blocking I/O.
- Scalable HTTP server based on the Jetty project.
- Support for CommonJS packages to install or write additional software components.
For more information, visit the RingoJS web site: http://ringojs.org/
Ringo requires a recent version of Java. It uses Apache Ant as build tool and Ivy (>= 2.4 is required) for managing dependencies.
If you have these installed, building Ringo is straightforward:
Check out Ringo using Git:
git clone git://github.com/ringo/ringojs.git
Change to the ringojs directory and run the ant update task to fetch
dependencies:
ant update
Then run the jar task to compile the code and build the jar file:
ant jar
Run the docs task to build the documentation:
ant docs
It is recommended but not strictly required to add the ringojs bin directory to your PATH environment variable. If you don't you'll have to type the full path to the bin/ringo command in the examples below.
To start the Ringo shell, just run the ringo command without any arguments:
ringo
To run a script simply pass it to ringo on the command line. For example, to run the Ringo test suite:
ringo test/all.js
Use the basic ringo-admin command to create a new web application or install packages. To create a blank Ringo web app:
ringo-admin create [appdir]
To install a package from a zip URL:
ringo-admin install [packageurl]
Ringo does not ship with a built-in package manager.
An easy way to manage packages and their dependencies is the evolving Ringo package manager rp.
The main benefit of rp over ringo-admin is that rp downloads dependencies defined in the packages descriptors.
rp can install any package available in its online registry.
To install rp itself you can use the ringo-admin tool:
ringo-admin install grob/rp
For more information visit the rp documentation wiki.
If you have questions visit http://ringojs.org/ or join the mailing list at http://groups.google.com/group/ringojs.