Re: BeanShell alternatives (was Re: Status of projectand adding 1.5 generics)

I talked with my partner today and we decided to stay with BeanShell.
We've been using it for several years in production and it would be 
difficult to extract,
and there's no compelling reason to change except the "FUD" of it being "not 
supported".
That's still a concern but not big enough to cause us to want to toss it.
We have the source and the know-how if we need to spot-fix something ...
In fact even today I'm integrating in BSH support to our other product line 
under the philosophy that sharing the same technology across products is a 
good thing.

So not only is BSH alive and well ... but its being continued in new 
projects .. atleast in my shop.
Given that I would LOVE some kind of semi-active semi-official handover of 
the codebase to dedicated maintainers, and volunteer to be one of them.
the beanshell2 google fork is a good thing, I have contributed to it in the 
past, but I think its goals are different then what I suggest.  I suggest a 
fork who's #1 main goal is stability and minimum changes.  Bug fixes only 
... and MAYBE a path towards new java syntax support ... but not new 
features, and heavily focused on maintaining legacy use.  I think thats a 
fundamentally different goal then a "new and better beanshell" which is also 
a good goal ... but not the one I'm most interested in personally.   To 
achieve this goal I suspect will require some kind of "committee" so that no 
individual is tempted to make changes without consensus or oversight.  Of 
course that slows things down and is inefficient ... but then that's the 
point.


At one point bsh was approved for JSR 274
http://jcp.org/en/jsr/detail?id=274

but that seems to have had no action in almost 4 years so I suspect its safe 
to call it dead.

-----------------------------------------------------------
David A. Lee
[email protected]
http://www.calldei.com
------------------------------------------------
David A. Lee
CTO
Nexstra, Inc.
dlee-qNp/[email protected]
office: 812-482-5224
cell: 812-827-0743
www.nexstra.com


> We will still need legacy support for BeanShell, perhaps for years.
> Also, looking at our experience with Jython and Groovy, I may have
> been too hasty on both to assume they were dying. Open source projects
> tend to live forever in some form or another and if there is
> sufficient interest we can revive BeanShell. I see no inherent
> problems with it as it stands now, but without regular releases and
> keeping up with Java it will be perceived as a dead end.
>


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