Internal scripting/programming language allowed in an iPhone App Store app?

Question

I've heard some conflicting things about the acceptability of scripting languages (e.g., Lua) in apps for the App Store. I'd like to hear from anyone who understands the policy regarding apps which contain some level of programmability, or someone who has had experience submitting such an app for approval.

For instance, suppose I want to develop a statistical package of some sort. It might provide the user with an application-specific language to code scripts that would manipulate data by calling built-in statistical functions.

If this scripting facility has no access to any entities outside of the application's sandbox, is it likely to present a hurdle to App Store acceptance?

Answer 1

Yes.

Using Javascript code run inside a UIWebView is an explicitly allowed scripting methodology. See PhoneGap for one example usage.

Other scripting languages may be acceptable if they do not run any downloaded code or compile any executable code (even JIT). This is standard methodology for many 3D game engines. (Apple's SDK agreement was changed to allow this circa September 2010.)

Added comments:

Other examples: There are at least 5 Basic interpreters and several programmable calculators currently in the iOS App Store. Perhaps interpreters for Scheme, Ruby and Python as well.

Unknown: If you were to develop an interpreter in Javascript for a statistical language, could that Javascript in a UIWebView download and interpret source code in that application specific statistical language?