What’s missing? CPAN for JavaScript

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I’ve been messing around with Perl in-between conferences at SxSW. What’s delighted me is how little I have to code because of CPAN, an archive of Perl Modules.

In order to write a simple RSS aggregator all I had to do was:
1) Create a class for fetching and saving the RSS.
2) Use a Perl module with web client functionality. (LWP::Simple)
3) Use a Perl module that can parse RSS. (XML::RSS::Parser)

my $lostdogs = Fetcher->new();
$lostdogs->feed("http://sfbay.craigslist.org/search/ccc/nby?query=lost%20dog&fo
rmat=rss");
$lostdogs->getfeed();
$lostdogs->savefeed('lostdogs.rss');

Now what if there was something like CPAN for JavaScript? Wouldn’t it make building all those AJAX apps easier? You wouldn’t have to be committed to either Dojo or YUI or Prototype.

Comments

4 responses to “What’s missing? CPAN for JavaScript”

March 14, 2007

Ted Husted

YUI has already started a mini JS CPAN with a twist. Since this is the ‘net and this is JavaScript, instead of downloading a library for local installation, your application can connect to Yahoo’s copy of the library hosted on their own high-performance network.

* http://yuiblog.com/blog/2007/02/22/free-yui-hosting/

So, it’s even easier that CPAN, or Maven, or any of that

-Ted.
March 15, 2007

barce

Thanks, Ted. I just read the blog that Ted posted, and can’t wait to try the JPAN. I’ll follow up with another blog post.
April 10, 2007

Jesse Proulx

My mind flubbed earlier; I wasn’t thinking of JSON, I was thinking of JSAN, the Javascript Archive Network that is closely derived from CPAN: http://www.openjsan.org/
April 18, 2007

barce

That’s exactly what I’m looking for, thanks!