NAME JSAN::ServerSide - Manage JSAN dependencies server side instead of with XMLHttpRequest SYNOPSIS use JSAN::ServerSide; my $server = JSAN::ServerSide->new( js_dir => '/usr/local/js', uri_prefix => '/js', ); $server->add('DOM.Ready'); $server->add('DOM.Display'); $server->add('My.Class'); In a template ... % for my $uri ( $server->uris ) { % } DESCRIPTION The JSAN Javascript library allows you to import JSAN libraries in a similar way to as Perl's "use". This module provides a server-side replacement for the JSAN library's importing mechanism. The JSAN library's importing mechanism, which uses XMLHttpRequest, has several downsides. Some browsers (including Firefox) do not respect caching headers when using XMLHttpRequest, so files will always be re-fetched from the server. After a library is retrieved, JSAN uses Javascript's "eval" to compile the Javascript libraries, which can cause the browser to report errors as if they were coming from JSAN, not the library that was fetched. This module lets you create an object to manage dependencies on the server side. You tell it what libraries you want to use, and it finds their dependencies and makes sure they are loaded in the correct order. Each Javascript file will be parsed looking for JSAN "use" lines in the form of " JSAN.use("Some.Library") ". Then when you call "uris()", it returns a list of uris in the necessary order to satisfy the dependencies it found. Caching Dependency information is cached in memory in the *class* in such a way as to preserve this information across requests under mod_perl, meaning you can create a new "JSAN::ServerSide" object for each request and Javascript files which have not changed will not be re-parsed. METHODS This class provides the following functions: * new(...) This method accepts two parameters: o js_dir This parameter is required. It is the root directory of your JSAN-style Javascript libraries. o uri_prefix This parameter is required. It is the prefix to be prepended to generated URIs. * add('Class.Name') This method accepts a JSAN-style library name (like "DOM.Ready") and adds it to the object's list of libraries. * uris Returns a list of URIs, generated by turning the given JSAN library names into URIs, along with any dependencies specified by those libraries. The list comes back in the proper order to ensure that dependencies are loaded first. MOCK JSAN If you use this module, you will need to mock out JSAN in your generated HTML/JS. Since the libraries being parsed contain a "JSAN.use()" call, this interface must be mocked in order to prevent an error. In the future, I hope JSAN will support a usage mode that only provides exporting, without attempting to load libraries. Mocking JSAN can be done with the following code: JSAN = {}; JSAN.use = function () {}; CIRCULAR DEPENDENCIES Currently, this module allows for circular dependencies, because that could work, depending on how the dependent classes are used. For example, if "A" depends on "B" and vice versa, then A could still work as long as it does not try to use B immediately at load time, but rather defers that use until it is called by other code. In Perl, this is never a problem because of the separate between compile and run time phases. In the future, this module may offer some sort of circular dependency detection. SEE ALSO http://www.openjsan.org/, "JSAN::Parse::FileDeps", "JSAN.pm" AUTHOR Dave Rolsky, BUGS Please report any bugs or feature requests to "bug-jsan-serverside@rt.cpan.org", or through the web interface at . I will be notified, and then you'll automatically be notified of progress on your bug as I make changes. COPYRIGHT & LICENSE Copyright 2005 Dave Rolsky, All Rights Reserved. This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.