Version: 0.1 (21 September 2010)
Author: Joe Walker [ joe at getahead dot org ]
License: Apache v2

ServerDOM is an implementation of the DOM in JavaScript that lives on the server rather than in the browser. ServerDOM uses tautologistics node-htmlparser to do the nasty work of HTML parsing.

Server-side JavaScript brings with it the promise of being able to share logic between the client and the server. It's nice to be able to write your code only once.

However this is tricky with presentation logic, which often requires a DOM to work against. Enter ServerDOM to provide a minimalist browser environment so you can do progressive enhancement type things without writing everything twice.

If there's not much interest, the the roadmap ends here, because it's currently good enough for me, but if people like it then we can probably sort out some releases like "Supports JQuery v1.4", "Supports DOM levels 0-3" and so on. I will be relying on help making it better though.

Step 1: Install Node

Step 2: Install and use ServerDOM:

$ git clone git@github.com:joewalker/serverdom.git
Initialized empty Git repository in /.../serverdom/.git/
[blah blah]
$ cd serverdom
$ git clone http://github.com/tautologistics/node-htmlparser.git
Initialized empty Git repository in /.../serverdom/node-htmlparser/.git/
[blah blah]
$ node test/domtest.js
completed
$ vi test/domtest.js
"I see! It works like a browser DOM, but you start with 'new Document(...)'"

To check that dom/js works in the same way as the browser, just load test/test.html into your browser. It will run the test suite against the a real DOM. The results should be the same.

Just good enough for my needs at the moment, which is to say, very probably not good enough for yours. It's a good way to covering most of the obvious stuff but it's a long way from being a full browser mock-up.

It's probably not possible to write a full mock browser in pure JavaScript. For example, several browsers have a fake document.all that appears to not exist until you use it, and then it magically works

if (!document.all) { console.log('missing all'); } // missing all
console.log(document.all.someId);                  // debugs an element

Maybe there's a smart way of doing this, but the point remains, trying to replicate the full browser in pure JavaScript is probably a fools errand.

It means that you probably can't use ServerDOM to do unit tests. We can't hope to mock the full insanity of the browser environment, but we can use it for the more idealistic world of replicating mailable view logic. That is to say, if you have some presentation logic that uses the mad document.all behaviour (*) then you can still use ServerDOM, but by fixing your script.

(* I know why document.all behaves the way it does - sometimes it pays to pretend to be mad if you're dealing with someone that expects insanity - however that doesn't make your behaviour sane, only justifiably insane ;-)

Comments, complaints, etc: [ joe at getahead dot org ]