[GR-Jug] [J2EE or PHP]

[Dave Brondsema]

Kyle Adams wrote:
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> Groovy: Groovy seems like re-inventing the wheel to me, especially when
> we already have mature (which Groovy is not) scripting languages like
> BeanShell and Javascript (Rhino).  The disclaimer is that I've never
> used Groovy, but many of the people I've talked to have expressed
> serious reservations about it.
>
> The feeling I got was that a bunch of people jumped on the bandwagon at
> the beginning, they implemented some whiz-bang features, but no one
> bothered creating a solid core.  Consequently work slowed to a crawl as
> the whiz-bang aspect faded because no one wanted to take on the
> boring-but-necessary parts of creating a language.  Does anyone know
> what the current state of the Groovy project is?  Is there still a
> healthy amount of activity and progress towards a final 1.0?
>
> I know that Dave Brondsema did an evaluation of various scripting
> languages in the Java world awhile back, so I'd be curious to hear his
> perspective...
>

I did?  :-)  It was long long ago, in a galaxy far, far away.

My closest recollection to that was determining which scripting language
to use within a <script> task [1] in Ant.  (Ant xml is better for
declarative build processes, not real programming)  There were several
choices [2] I think I settled on Rhino, a JavaScript implementation in
Java.  I don't remember why.  It worked well enough, but was a pain to
debug, probably due to the fact that that scriptlets were in a XML file,
and executed through Ant.  That is to say, it wasn't a very simple
environment and error messages didn't pass through very well.

[1] http://ant.apache.org/manual/OptionalTasks/script.html
[2] http://jakarta.apache.org/bsf/

To the original question, at Cornerstone University we run a real small
software shop: one Java developer (me), one PHP/web developer, and one
Access/VB programmer.  I'd like to see a lot of it standardize into one
language for shared skillset/training/etc purposes.  But when it comes
down to choices, PHP is a lot easier to do simple things in than Java
is.  So we've done simple (often unique) web apps in PHP, and in Java
we've done our webapps that are large and complex or that share common
functionality with several other webapps.

> One final word: I'm much more skeptical about running scripting
> languages inside the JVM.  Problems: the overhead of the JVM (primarily
> memory), lagtime behind the "real" scripting language, minor deviations
> in functionality, etc.  I see scripting in the JVM as a nice tool in the
> box for existing Java apps, but not as a replacement for the native
> scripting environments.  If I'm writing a Rails app, it's going to be
> running in native Ruby served up via WebBrick or FastCGI.  I don't want
> the headache of dealing with "well I found instructions for doing it
> this way, but JRuby hasn't implemented that yet [or: it works
> differently]."  I have enough of that stuff running a Mac (both with PC
> and Linux software) :-)
>
> If I'm evaluating what language to use at the beginning of a project,
> I'm still going to lean towards scripting languages outside of the JVM
> for lighterweight work.  The primary practical use of scripting within
> the JVM (as I see it) is in providing easy extension points for app
> functionality.  Example: using Python scripting to extend the
> functionality of WinCVS.
>
> Kyle
>
> _____
>
> Kyle Adams | Java Developer  |  Gordon Food Service  |  616-717-6162
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--
Dave Brondsema : dave at brondsema.net
http://www.brondsema.net : personal
http://www.splike.com : programming
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