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

David A. Lee writes:
 > 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".

I wouldn't call lack of support FUD.  The maintainer of the beanshell
project has been MIA for a year now and even before that things began
to stagnate.  One example of how it's been affected is that beanshell
hasn't been brought up to even 1.5 (annotations, generics, etc).  Yes,
there was someone who added that to beanshell2, but this project has
no maintainer.  Everyone adds and modifies as they like to it.

 > 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

I think most, including myself, would disagree with that.  Most on
this thread, including developers of beanshell are calling it dead.

 > 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 fork is good.  But without a maintainer, its difficult to add it
to any project and have any reasonable comfort with it as a
dependency given the dynamic of development.

 > 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

I agree.

 > 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

IMO, JSRs carry less weight.  Take for example the java.util logging.
At the time the Sun java.util logging was put out, log4j was already
ubiquitous but Sun choose to develop their own anyway.

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

I agree.

-- 
Paul Landes
[email protected]

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