Using Julia with JavaScript

In certain use cases, you might want to use JS for client-side web programming together with Julia. The client JS code could even be generated by Julia using part or a combination of the JSExpr, Blink, and WebIO packages, as we’ll see in the following sections.

JSExpr

The JSExpr.jl package (https://github.com/JuliaGizmos/JSExpr.jl) translates Julia syntactically into JS. As usual, you can get it in the REPL package mode through add JSExpr, and then a using JSExpr command in the normal REPL.

JSExpr works by providing two dedicated macros: @js and js"".

@js transpiles a Julia expression into JS. It does this by making a JSString, which contains the JS code as a string. The following is an example of converting a Julia cube function into its JS equivalent:

@js function cube(arg)
return arg * arg * arg
end

The return value is as follows:

JSString("function cube(arg){return (arg*arg*arg)}")

In the following example...