Jint tutorial 001 - embeding JavaScript in a C# application

The is the first post of a series where I will show how to embed and execute JavaScript in a C# application using the JavaScript runtime Jint.

Jint is a Javascript v 5 interpreter written in C# 4.0 using the Portable Library Standard and run or will run on the following platforms:

• Windows (using Microsoft stack) 
• MacOS (using Mono or Xamarin stack)
• iOS (using Xamarin stack)
• Android (using Xamarin stack)
• Linux (using Mono stack)

As we progress in the different tutorials, I will show

• How to write C# classes and objects that can be exposed to the JavaScript world.
• How to write asynchronous API and call back function

Generally I am interested in interoperability between C# and JavaScript.

At this time of this writing, the developers of Jint are focusing on Windows. I will personally soon test on iOS and MacOS.

How do I do it?

In this sample, I created a C# console app that

• Instantiate a Jint engine
• Create a JavaScript function print() so we can output object to the console
• Execute a Script
• Get the script return value

 
    class Program
    {
        static Jint.Engine _engine;

        public static void Print(object s)
        {
            if (s == null)
                s = "null";
            Console.WriteLine(s.ToString());
        }

        private static Jint.Engine CreateEngine()
        {
            return new Engine().SetValue("print", new Action<object>(Print));
        }

        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            var source = @"
                var s = 'Hello World From JavaScript ';

                for(var i=0; i<4; i++) {
                    print(s + i);
                }                
                s; // Evaluate and return the expression
            ";
            var s = CreateEngine().Execute(source).GetCompletionValue();
            Console.WriteLine(s.AsString());
            Console.ReadLine();
        }
    }