What's up with Scripting support on Glassfish?

Scripting is becoming ever popular among web application developers. Glassfish already supports Ruby on Rails with JRuby, Phobos brings in solid support for JavaScript on Glassfish and AJAX framework jMaki and all of these with excellent NetBeans tooling. There are other scripting languages such as PHP and Python, which are very popular among developers too. How nice would it be to deploy your PHP or Python based web applications on Glassfish? Well, we know that marrying Java and scripting languages has it's own challenges.

JSR-223 let you execute dynamic languages from inside Java. However the interpreters for such languages are written in Java and generate bytecodes and at runtime deal with all the dynamic types and method dispatching and what not. This is because JVM is designed to be used for statically typed language such as Java where you know the types at the compile time and to take care of  types at the runtime the dynamic language interpreters use complex mechanism, which results in to uses of more memory, performance etc. JRuby overcomes these by doing JIT ahead of time, but then this poses limitation specially on the server side considering Rails which is single threaded.

The good news is that there are efforts in place in JVM to support Dynamic Languages, such as JSR -292 is going to add a new bytecode, invokedynamic, that supports efficient and flexible execution of method invocations in the absence of static type information. There is also a new project Da Vinci Machine that is going to bring in support for dynamic languages (or any other language) to JVM.

You might wonder why I am talking about all the scripting stuff! Well, I have taken up the role of Scripting Lead in Glassfish. I will ensure that Glassfish is home to many of the popular scripting languages out there and in fact will try to bring best of both worlds to Glassfish. JAX-WS will be lead by very capable Jitu.

I am working on wrapping up implementing some new features for upcoming Metro 1.2 or JAX-WS RI 2.1.4 and starting to take on Scripting Lead. Stay tuned, you will be hearing more form me in coming days...