Perl Script in BlackBerry WebWorks app?

Question

Is it possible to implement a Perl script in a WebWorks application for the Playbook? I am trying to implement Markdown and cannot find a JavaScript library that works well. I have tried Showdown but it throws an error when I feed it a string.

Alternatively, what other Markdown processors work on the WebWorks platform?

Answer 1

It's conceivable you could do this, but entirely non-trivial. There's no native Perl interpreter on the PlayBook, so you'd have to port one and bundle it into your app. Then you'd have to write an AIR Native Extension to provide the interface to it from the WebWorks runtime, which is built on AIR. You'd also then have to write some Javascript extension stuff to provide access to the ANE code.

I'd suggest not attempting this... it would be difficult and very ugly. Unfortunately I have no suggestions for actual alternatives as I'm not familiar with Markdown other than as supported by the appropriate Python library.

Answer 2

What's so special about Markdown?

Just use Javascript regular expressions to achieve similar things by strings substitutions.