Sun Microsystems is working with numerous industry partners to support the use of scripting languages in its Java platform. Sun and Zend are leading the effort, which will create a way for developers to write Java applications using popular scripting languages like PHP, ECMAscript, and ASP. According to O’Reilly, Sun could boost its number of Java developers by another 3 million in this way. Elsewhere, Sun’s CEO Scott McNealy defended the business merits of his company’s Java effort, saying that, despite disappointing sales of Sun’s own Java software, the effort has helped keep Microsoft at bay.
Sun to Add Scripting on Java; McNealy: Java’s Got a Hold on Microsoft
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
Adding PHP scripting to Java is a very intelligent move on the part of Sun. It would certainly open up Java to more developers and many more interesting web apps.
Of course, the interest and motivation didn’t come from Sun itself but from Zend, the creators of PHP. But Sun did allow it to happen, so that is on a relative scale, an amazing breakthrough for McNealy and his cadre of Moronic Monkeys.
And I would hope if Sun has any brain cells, they can see that Java should be scriptable by Perl, Python, Ruby, etc., in some uniform, elegant, gentle, and simple manner.
And while they are working on it, why not rework JNI to be more advanced, more similar to how .NET works?
Java already has python scripting through Jython. Other languages used to script java are TCL and Java (beanshell).
http://javalobby.org/thread.jsp?forum=61&thread=5185&message=527709…
Cheers
Here’s an older Javaworld article in which they compare Java scripting options for Java applications : http://www.javaworld.com/javaworld/jw-04-2002/jw-0405-scripts.html
The comparison is between Jacl (Tcl), Jython (Python), Rhino (JavaScript) and BeanShell (Java) with Jython coming out on top.
Open Source project originally by IBM. Now a Jakarta project.
http://jakarta.apache.org/bsf/
Works excellent. Should be really easy to add PHP to the collection.
Support for Netscape Rhino (Javascript), VBScript, Perl, Tcl, Python, NetRexx, Rexx and more.
“keeping Microsoft at bay.”
This is a terrible business plan and that’s all that Sun has done for the past several years is trying to keep MS at bay. Microsoft isn’t even in the same league of computing as Sun is and yet that’s all they can come up with as a business plan.
Java is a good idea, sure it has performance issues, but it’s still better for cross platform work and frontends than most every other system. Sun needs to quit worrying about Microsoft and concentrating on making viable and unique products to cater to it’s primary customers: enterprise level datacenters and R&D customers. Sun hasn’t released anything new and unique since Java finally took off after several target failures of it’s own.
It’s primary competitor, IBM, is releasing new and unique solutions left and right leaving Sun in the dust.
Exactly. Put both previous posts together.
What is news about the idea to add scripting to Java? There have been both open and closed source implementations all over the place. AFAIR, Caucho’s Resin Java server had Javascript support years ago, and Rhino has been around for at least 3 or 4 years already.
The real story is about Sun’s continuing effort to (clumsily) reinvent itself. The fact that they identify one of their prime business objectives as simply thwarting Microsoft is quite telling, really.
See http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20030213.html and http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/StrategyLetterV.html
Reading that last link makes you think: as good a language as Java is, wasn’t it really a major business faux pas for Sun?
Note on the above: you have to read the beginning of the joelonsoftware.com article, and then the note about Sun near the end. I wish I could see the look on your faces when you get it ;-).