Re: Status of project and adding 1.5 generics

On Dec 8, 2008, at 7:42 PM, Paul Landes wrote:

> Is there anyone attached to beanshell for JDE critical functionality?
> Again, I'm a huge fan of it, but not if it isn't maintained.

We use it extensively at Partner Software. It's the primary scripting  
language for our platform (a sort of gis viewer on steroids with  
accompanying application server).

I have been concerned about beanshell's lack of support for some time.  
We originally used Jython (back when it was the only scripting  
language for Java), then played with Groovy, and finally settled on  
BeanShell. My primary requirement was that it be more or less  
syntactically identical to Java, so that I could easily port code to  
and from Java, and so that people starting in scripting could migrate  
to "real" Java development without too much change shock.

Jython was adrift for awhile but now seems actively maintained. I have  
no problem with Jython or Python per se but I find it difficult to go  
back and forth between it and Java - they are syntactically close  
enough to make it easy to screw up.

I liked Groovy initially but it started wandering off weirdly for  
awhile, then they made the decision to make it very different from  
Java so I lost interest.

I have cracked open the BeanShell code and fixed some of the issues.  
It's not terribly well written and has some modularity issues; I had  
to hack in some support for a sort of compile-once-run-often model to  
improve performance - our system tends to have lots of small scripts  
that get executed often. And as others have mentioned it would be nice  
to get 1.5 and 1.6 features in. I did add vararg support though it's  
not perfect.

Nowadays there are any number of scripting languages one can code in;  
I've made the support in our platform modular so it supports bison,  
jython, jruby, beanshell, stringtemplate and pretty much any other  
implementation of the Java scripting framework or even custom ones if  
you can implement a simple interface. But I still like the idea of a  
very Java-like scripting language.

Considering our investment in it so far, I would be willing to adopt  
the project and work on getting a new version out, especially with  
those fixes I feel need to be in there. I don't have tons of time,  
however, and I can't guarantee that I would push the code very  
aggressively. By and large it works well for us. My goals would be:
1) stability
2) performance
3) adherence to Java syntax wherever possible

I am not at all interested in custom syntax, extension frameworks like  
Grails, etc.

And with all due respect to Pat, I've always thought the name was silly.



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