Greg Murray's Blog

Sun and Scripting

They say any news is good news so long as they spell your name straight. Quotes from me were used Sun Microsystems finds the JavaScript love to give the impression that Sun is riding the AJAX phenomenon and JavaScript to promote Java. While I will admit that AJAX has helped increase interested in JavaScript inside of Sun, the work to integrate JavaScript in Java SE 6 through JSR 223 began in June of 2003 which is long before the AJAX phenomenon. Sun is one of the first large companies to promote AJAX. See the BluePrints Solutions Catalog for AJAX first published in May of 2005, Asynchronous JavaScript Technology and XML (AJAX) With Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition in June 2005, and my very first blog Rich Web Applications with AJAX published in April of 2005 just for a few examples.

Sun is committed to supporting JavaScript. Plan see more scripting in the future from Sun. We are working with the Dojo Foundation on a great JavaScript toolkit and the Open AJAX Alliance to promote AJAX and JavaScript library compatibility across vendors . We see it important to support JavaScript developers on both the client and the server. We have Project jMaki and Project Phobos which both focus on providing tools for JavaScript developers by extending the Java platform. Sun has other solutions such as Cool Stack which may be used for scripting even without Java.

Sun is investing in other scripting languages other JavaScript such as can be seen with the hiring of two key developers in the JRuby community. With JSR 223 we can enable other scripting languages and I suspect there will be many much more to come.

What more would you like to see Sun do with JavaScript and scripting in general?

Comments

• I realized this very recently. A JavaScript engine is being included in Java 6. That's forward thinking, not just to the level of a library or framework, but really long-term thinking, 5 years ahead. Who knows what we'll be talking about in 5 years (probably Ruby on Rails on JVM, if you look at the current hype) but it doesn't matter specifically.

  
  Java and Sun and others behind Java have been so forward thinking in certain areas that we'll be surprised how well Java handles the future. It's easy for server-side guys like me to think that JEE 5 is coming along too slow on the curve, but I've been looking at Swing, etc on the client recently and overall Java is still looking pretty darn good.
  

  Posted by: spiritmech on October 06, 2006 at 03:36 PM

• Hi Greg: "What more would you like to see Sun do with JavaScript and scripting in general?"

  Some ideas: encourage a project on java.net to build a good "console" for hosting different scripting tools, with history/edit/dump context etc. functionality. I think a number of the scripting languages have these, but since we have a common VM, we should be able to develop a pretty good multi-language console. IRB makes the Ruby people happy.

  Another project would be to host utility scripts written in different scripting languages, where they could be downloaded and installed from a common meta-project repository. Useful for learning samples and encouraging experimentation.

  Also, having Sun engineers blog about how (or if) JVM scripting is making their life easier would also be a plus; I guess an example would be Scott Violet's testing app with uses BeanShell for quick prototyping.

  Last, I think a decent "scripts host" like Nailgun/Echidna/JSH would be a neat thing to promote, which lets scripts (or Java classes, actually) remain in memory for rapid re-execution. The performance boost helped me on some recent projects and the idea could use some serious investigation around issues like security, lifecycle, classloading, etc. I'd rather not wait for the fabled MVM to see small utility scripts take off. With the new scripting API it should be easier to write a solid, common host.

  Regards, Patrick

  Posted by: pdoubleya on October 09, 2006 at 07:29 AM

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