❯ Guillaume Laforge

Scripting at JavaOne 2006

conference groovy

Scripting is definitely in fashion these days on the Java Virtual Machine. The JavaOne 2006 session catalog is online, and by browsing it, you’ll notice there are several sessions and BOFs dedicated to scripting. By simply searching for the word “scripting” in the content catalog viewer, you’ll count no less than 13 sessions speaking about scripting.

This will be my first time at JavaOne. And a big first time since I’ll be presenting a session! Along with Tugdual Grall from Oracle, we’ll be presenting TS-1246 entitled “Simplify Enterprise Development With Scripting” in the “Core Platform, JAVA SE” track. The abstract of the session is:

Scripting languages (a.k.a. dynamic languages) provide a different style of programming than system languages such as the Java programming language. They enable developers to rapidly glue components together to build applications. The Java platform now has multiple scripting solutions - Groovy, JRuby, Jython, and Rhino - that offer the power of Java technology by using the simplicity of typeless, interpreted scripting languages. This session demonstrates how scripting can simplify your everyday life by helping you administer clusters of servers or test or mock up your web services in no time. Through concrete demonstrations, the presentation explains how the dynamic nature of those languages can bring more agility to your service-oriented architecture and your fashionable AJAX applications. Finally, it discusses the future of scripting to give you a taste of tools you’ll be using tomorrow.

So if you’re coming to JavaOne this year, be sure to attend our session, and come and say hi!

Groovy and Grails will be fairly well covered this year. Grails has got its own BOF session (BOF-2521 about Grails, and TS-1664 about “RAD for the Java Platform Web Tier: Frameworks Smackdown”) presented by Graeme Rocher, the Grails project lead.

Groovy is mentionned in 6 sessions!

  • There’s Tugdual and I’s talk on “Simplifying Enterprise Development With Scripting” (TS-1246),
  • Graeme’s BOF on Grails (BOF-2521),
  • as well as Rod Cope yearly session on Groovy: “Groovy = Java Technology + Ruby + Python for the JVM” (TS-3273).

There should be a very interesting BOF on “Dynamic Scripting Languages” (BOF-0554). And to finish, there are two very interesting use cases of Groovy integration:

  • “Flash-Gridding with Java Technology: Using Glassfish, Jini/JavaSpaces, and Groovy as an Environment for an Open Source, Self-Assembling Supercomputer” (TS-3714)
  • “Groovy Goes RFID with Smart Sensors for Real-World Control” (TS-5386)

I was also pretty curious to see whether other scripting languages were represented, and I only noticed one session dedicated to JRuby: “JRuby: Bringing Ruby to the JVM Software” (TS-3059). Jython is mentionned in some talks (including the ones on Groovy), with only one session including a demo using Jython. BeanShell is mentionned in the session on TestNG. Rhino is mentioned in my talk only. But JavaScript is very present in that on the client-side, for web applications, there’s always been a lot of presentations speaking about it. So overall, it seems Groovy took the lion-share of the scripting languages for the JVM and we’ve got almost twice the coverage of last year. I’m very pleased to see the progress Groovy made both in terms of the quality of the project, and the mindshare we’ve garnered so far.