node.js.py

This module acts as a bridge to node.js and npm.

Node(dependencies, version, path, npm_version, daemonic) will start a process (all parameters optional). It will locally install and compile node.js and dependencies using nodeenv.

The processes communicate over HTTP using JSON-RPC 1.0. A Node instance acts as a bridge to the node process's global namespace.

node = Node(["coffee-script==1.0.1"], "0.4.8")

assert 2 == node.eval("2")

coffee = node.require("coffee")

double = coffee.eval("return (x) -> x * 2")

assert double(2) == 4

print coffee.compile("(x) -> x * 2")
# prints "(function(x) {\n  return x * 2;\n});"""

The bridge maps Objects to NodeProxyObjects and Functions to NodeProxyFunctions. Booleans and strings map to the corresponding types, numbers map to floats, and null and undefined map to None.

NodeProxyObjects implement __copy__ and __deepcopy__ to create local copies of the remote objects.

Python callables can be passed to node.js, but they will execute asynchronously and return nothing. Define a parameter with a default value of nodejs.THIS to receive JavaScript's this value.

In node.js a python object will be defined, with the async methods exec and eval.

Python 2.6+ will be supported, but I won't be testing on Python 3 yet.