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Scripting and Java


By Allen Holub
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February 15, 2006 —  (Page 1 of 3)
The “general wisdom” about scripting languages—that systems written in them go together much faster and are much more flexible than compiled languages—is largely unsubstantiated conjecture. I just don’t believe that there’s anything inherent in a scripting language that makes for faster development and greater flexibility. I have noticed that garbage code written in PHP actually works a significant percentage of the time and that garbage code written in Java rarely works at all.

When a Java system is well-written, it’s quite flexible, and incremental changes of the sort championed by the scripting folks are easy to do. Moreover, not everything’s easy in a script. Take your average PHP system, where the HTML is embedded right in the PHP code that’s also implementing business logic. Simple look-and-feel changes, which would be trivial in a JSP-with-custom-tags system, are painful at best.

On the other hand, scripting languages do have their uses. For example, if you’re using AJAX heavily on a site that does little more than expose a database to the Web, then a scripting language is a perfectly good choice for supplying the glue that connects the AJAX control to the database. More complex sites require more complex structure, however.

Put another way, scripting languages are great for some parts of a system but not others. Hybrid systems—part Java, part PHP, part Ruby or Python—are becoming commonplace for good reason. If done properly, a hybrid architecture can solve complex problems better than a system written entirely in any one language. This structure is really just the hoary notion of a small language. Use a language that’s appropriate for the job at hand.

On the building-hybrid-systems front, JSR 223, Scripting for the Java Platform, is of particular interest. This JSR is slated for inclusion in the Mustang release and provides a means of interfacing Java programs to arbitrary scripting languages. A reference implementation is available, along with the full specification, at jcp.org and connects Java to PHP, JavaScript and Groovy.




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