it seems to be the year of the dynamicscripting language
This blog post is ancient. If it is technical, the information is likely inaccurate, or at least out of date. If it is non-technical, it’s entirely possible that the relevant facts and my own opinions have changed significantly since it was written.
It is only preserved as part of this site’s permanent historical archive.
It has been a whirlwind of a day. I’ve been to two keynotes (close to 5 hours of information there) and one technical session. Couple that information with what I heard at Java University yesterday, and you find many common themes. One that keeps coming up is the emerging trend of making other languages, particularly dynamic/scripting languages, first-class citizens on the JVM.
According to Wikipedia, “Dynamic programming language is a term used broadly in computer science to describe a class of high level programming languages that execute at runtime many common behaviors that other languages might perform during compilation, if at all. These behaviors could include extension of the program, by adding new code, or by extending objects and definitions, or by modifying the type system, all during program execution. These behaviors can be emulated in nearly any language of sufficient complexity, but dynamic languages provide direct tools to make use of them.” This definition seems to fit quite nicely with what I’ve heard the last two days. A couple of dynamic languages I’ve heard A LOT about are Groovy and Ruby.
Yes, Ruby and its most popular framework, Ruby on Rails, have survived the initial hype. They are here to stay. Not only that, they seem poised to make a serious impact on the way we will do web application development over the next several years. Sun made a HUGE splash when they decided to hire the core developers of JRuby, the project which in its current pre-1.0 release already runs 98% of Ruby on Rails as a first-class citizen on the JVM. Not only that, you can now create a WAR file from a Ruby on Rails application and deploy it to any Java application server! I’ll write more on this in another entry as I attended a full technical session on it.
If you’re too uncomfortable getting away from Java, why not try Groovy? After all, it is a JSR (241). All of Java syntax is legal in Groovy, plus a lot more. Groovy is a dynamic scripting language like Ruby and also compiles to bytecode, making it a first-class citizen on the JVM. It has its own MVC framework, Grails (formerly Groovy on Rails), which is a direct competitor to Ruby on Rails. I’ve already written on Groovy and Grails in an earlier entry.
I plan to attend some additional sessions focused on these dynamic languages, as it seems they will be really important in the years to come.