Passing Java lists into JS

[Attila Szegedi]

Nashorn explicitly allows [] operator on java lists and it also supports for…in on them. ".length" is also supported since 8u20, see <https://bugs.openjdk.java.net/browse/JDK-8039387>.

We indeed don't implicitly convert Lists into JS Array objects in Nashorn. The reason is that JS Array has a Java array as backing storage; wrapping a large list would incur a lot of copying. You can use "Java.from(someObject.provideList())" to explicitly convert a Java List to a JS array. We think it's better to provide an explicit conversion API than incur a linear conversion cost whenever a List object passes into the JS context.
The Java.from created copy is shallow; if you have a List of Lists, the nested List objects are not converted. 

Typically you'll want to create a real Array if you want to use Array functionality that points beyond [], .length, and for…in, e.g. JS Array comprehension operations (arguably, we *could* implement even those so that Array.prototype.forEach.call(javaList, ...) works as expected, but we aren't there yet.)

Attila.

On Nov 27, 2014, at 10:41 AM, Tim Fox <timvolpe at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hello again,
> 
> I am a bit confused about how Lists passed from Java into JS are converted.
> 
> I have a Java class as follows:
> 
> public class SomeClass {
> 
>   public List<String> provideList() {
>     List<String> list = new ArrayList<>();
>     list.add("foo");
>     list.add("bar");
>     return list;
>   }
> }
> 
> I call this from JavaScript:
> 
> var io = Packages.io;
> var someObject = new io.vertx.scratchpad.SomeClass();
> 
> var arr = someObject.provideList();
> 
> console.log(arr[0]); // prints: foo
> console.log(typeof arr.length); // undefined
> console.log(arr instanceof Array); // false
> 
> I was under the impression that Nashorn automatically converted Java lists passed into JS into JS Arrays.
> 
> The object arr returned in some ways resembles a JavaScript array - the operators [] and []= work on it, however it doesn't have the array property "length" and it's not an instanceof Array.
> 
> Can anyone clarify to me what this object is? Any reason why Nashorn doesn't just wrap it as a real JS Array?
> 
> Cheers