QtScript 4 VBAuthor: Dave Date: 07.11.15 - 8:20am on the continued quest to have an embeddable JavaScript engine with integrated debugger that I can use in my VB6 apps for automation tasks, I have started experimenting with yet another engine. This one comes from the QT 4.8 framework in the form of QTScript. note that you must use the 4.8 branch, in the 5.x branch they have switched over to using v8, and do not appear to have the debugger protocol wired in. Many people complained of this. My personal preference is to use a little bit older libraries and development tools anyway so this is fine for my task. (I won't start on a rant here, but I prefer to use software from the pre-bloatware era such as vb6, VS2008, photoshop 7 etc.. I don't need a billion features and pretty interfaces... I want fast responsive native applications with a minimal runtime overhead whose main goal is function and usability, not prettiness. I also refuse to be sucked in by trends with no staying power which result in wasted time like wpf, windows phone development, silverlight, etc..) anyway not to get sidetracked, so the QT script framework has a complete debugger interface already built-in that you can utilize in only a few lines of code. 
With a few more lines of code you can wrap this in a DLL and utilize it from Visual Basic six. the mechanism that I designed for the duktape JavaScript engine to access VB6 form elements and general COM objects is also easily applied to this script engine. The runtime requirements are a little heavy. A release build of the required DLLs will weigh in at a pretty hefty 12 MB. so that is a cost, however it takes very little code in order to access all of these advanced features. There also looks to be a way to add some similar capabilities using the QScriptEngineAgent class which I believe will only require 2mb dependencies (but with having to implement a UI on your own) Also the QT library has many many users, and there are many help answers available on the net already. Duktape on the other hand has pretty sparse information available as of yet in the help forums or mailing lists. one other aspect you would have to consider if evaluating QT-based components is that your project would either have to be licensed as GPL, or purchase a commercial license for the library. One other plus is that the QT library seems to be extremely well written, easy to use, and open source. I made a quick video discussing the design and showing some of the features: Comments: (1)On 07.13.15 - 9:08am Dave wrote:
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