The Rhino project was started at Netscape in 1997 and released to mozilla.org in 1998. It was made open source thereafter. The project gets its name from the animal on the cover of the JavaScript book [1] from O'Reilly (preview online).
Rhino converts JavaScript scripts into Java classes. Rhino works in both compiled as well as interpreted mode. It is intended to be used in applications, hence there is no support for browser objects that is commonly associated with JavaScript.
Rhino can be used as a debugger by making use of the Rhino shell. It can be used in applications by embedding Rhino.
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