I've been playing around with Pas2JS in the last couple of weeks. Glad to see it come out as a wonderful tool. However, I don't find its usage any straightforward. FYI, I'm on Linux.
The most cumbersome problem is the packaging. Starting from the
wiki article, I download a precompiled snapshot from
the ftp to get the compiler binary, compileserver a.k.a. simpleserver, webidl2pas and libpas2js.so. There are various demos and packages ready to use. However, contrary to the wiki article, which says:
As for the FPC compiler, a configuration file is supported, which has the same syntax as the FPC config file. Note that the snapshots and svn version already contains a default pas2js.cfg with unit search paths (-Fu) for the rtl and fcl.
There's no pas2js.cfg in the distributed snapshot. Digging in pas2js in my fpc source code, I do find one, so I just copy it to the bin directory of the snapshot. Analyzing the content, though, it seems to be designed to be used inside its directory in fpc source code, so I have to adjust some of the paths to reflect the snapshot hierarchy. During that process, there's a line that says:
-Fu$CfgDir/dist
that points to a non-existing dir dist. Again browsing fpc source code, it's found and contains a single rtl.js file, which is referenced in the wiki article but not mentioned elsewhere where to get it. Again I copy the dir to bin to match that -Fu line (because my pas2js.cfg is in the bin directory) and trying out the hello world example (from the wiki article) only to find out that it refers to rtl.run(); without ever referencing rtl.js (I thought -Jc option will do, but it doesn't as the first line starts with rtl.module, where rtl is an unknown object. With that fixed, finally the example works.
That experience is certainly not friendly at all, I can go through it just because I'm quite experienced in using fpc and I have good enough sense of exploration. For anyone else coming to try, it will be a showstopper. I don't think I want to put above steps into my tutorial, I'd rather wait for the packaging to be user friendly first.
P.S.:
It's unclear to me how the snapshot was generated, a make install in the pas2js directory only installs the binaries and seemingly useless lib directory, no packages, no demos, dist directory and pas2js.cfg excluded.
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