Using Unix tools in Unhosted projects

[Manuel Schölling]

Dear unhosted fellows,

although I'm a big fan of the unhosted idea and I subscribed to this
mailing list a while a go, I never posted anything -- so here the first
sign of live from me: ;)

Some time ago I was developing a unhosted web application (that I never
finished) where I had the problem of creating PDF documents.
In general this is quite a problem for unhosted apps because you need
for example a server that runs a program or library to compile the PDFs.

Then I stumbled upon Mozilla's Emscripten project [1]. It compiles e.g.
native C/C++ code to LLVM bytecode and then converts this bytecode to
Javascript that runs in the browser.

After some fiddling I managed to get LaTeX working in the browser. My
little project [2] is not 100% mature but you can compile documents and
letters with it.

Once this worked I started to convert other programs to Javascript and
the unix-toolbox.js project [3] was born. The aim of this project is to
convert all these great Unix command line tools to Javascript (WebWorker
support required) and make it accessible by a unified API.

Currently it supports
- poppler (PDF manipulator and converter)
- imagemagick (Image manipulator and converter)
- file (the UNIX tool to determine file types)
- xz ((de-)compression)

I'm sure some of you might consider using it in their unhosted apps.

Comments, contributions and pull requests are welcome!


Have a great weekend!

Manuel



[1] http://emscripten.org/
[2] https://github.com/manuels/texlive.js/
demo: http://manuels.github.com/texlive.js/website/
[3] http://manuels.github.com/unix-toolbox.js

[Nick Jennings]

Hi Manuel, thanks for posting! The unix-toolbox.js project looks
great, I will definitely keep this in mind during development.
Interesting stuff indeed!
-Nick

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