Part III Computer Science Project
Department of Electronics & Computer Science
University of Southampton
| Name: | Alex Walker |
| Title of Project: | JavaScript Parser and Error-Reporter |
| First Project Supervisor: | Ed Zaluska |
| Second Project Supervisor: | Gwil Edmonds |
In the Internet and Intranet Development industry, the scripting language JavaScript is used within an HTML document to control and interact with the web browser, and provide dynamic content. On the server, it is used to format pages on the fly, often including data from a database.
A regularly occurring problem is that JavaScript is interpreted at runtime by the web browser, not compiled in advance. This results in errors occurring at runtime. This may produce an error dialog box, or more often than not, the error will not be reported, and the script will not function correctly. This makes it hard to identify errors in the script, and hard to debug these errors.
To write a parser and error-checking program that will load a JavaScript file, and identify syntactical and grammatical errors within that script. The program should be well documented, and of such a quality and maintainability that it can be used in industry.
The program will use a simple GUI to enable loading of a file, and display of any generated errors. The program will optionally run only from the command line, and report errors to the standard output.
There are a few variations of the JavaScript language. This project will use the "JavaScript 1.0" language, as used by the Netscape Navigator 2.0 browser software. If time allows later in the project, this may be expanded to the "JavaScript 1.1" specification.
The program will be coded using Java Version 1.1, from Sun Microsystems. This allows the program to run on any platform supporting the Java Virtual Machine.
The intended schedule for this project is described below:
Figure 1.0 - Time Schedule for Part III Project