I'd be tickled pink to see parrot in a browser, and that would
certainly attract more developers writing grammars. And parrot's
grammar engine makes it a great choice.
There's an active project moving perl to Google's app engine. I
mention it because they have strict sandbox requirements, and it seems
that borrowing those concepts can be useful for getting started. Of
course even better is to get sandbox requirements from Mozilla
directly!
Here's a bit from the code.google.com site-
"Examples of the limitations of the secure sandbox environment include:
* An application can only access other computers on the Internet
through the provided URL fetch and email services. Other computers can
only connect to the application by making HTTP (or HTTPS) requests on
the standard ports.
* An application cannot write to the file system. An app can read
files, but only files uploaded with the application code. The app must
use the App Engine datastore, memcache or other services for all data
that persists between requests.
* Application code only runs in response to a web request or a
cron job, and must return response data within 30 seconds in any case.
A request handler cannot spawn a sub-process or execute code after the
response has been sent."
In practice that means, no calls to "open" and no socket calls- all IO
is done through google-supplied libraries.
more on the perl->goog app eng project at
http://groups.google.com/group/perl-appengine/browse_thread/thread/fbbcc202053dba86?pli=1
Since FF is open-source and has a well-described plugin & extension
architecture, since it and allows C++ code through XPCOM, we could
jump-start this by writing a parrot extension! And when I say "we", I
mean I'm cowardly suggesting that someone else take the project on, as
I can't do it myself!
