Apache Jakarta BSF Scripting Framework Officially Released

JavaScriptSearch
Tuesday, October 10, 2006; 07:50 AM

Apache Jakarta, a top-level Project of The Apache Software Foundation (ASF), announced the first official release of Apache Jakarta BSF v 2.4.0, a scripting framework for Java.

BSF v 2.4.0 allows Java programmers to invoke non-Java programs with as few as two lines of code written in any of the BSF-supported languages, including BeanShell, BML, Groovy, JavaScript (Rhino), JudoScript, NetRexx,
ooRexx, PROLOG (JLog), Python, Perl, Rexx, Ruby (JRuby), Tcl (Jacl), and XSLT (Xalan).

By using BSF v 2.4.0, any Java application can be easily turned into a Java script host (JSH), that allows scripts in different programming languages to share data (Java objects) with each other. This allows developers to instrument a mix of BSF scripts implemented with the programming language that best fits the solution of the problem aspect at
hand.

Seeing the potential in BSF, various ASF projects such as Apache Ant, Apache Jakarta Taglib BSF 1.1, and Apache Xalan implemented the technology prior to its official release. This was primarily due to its ability to ease the programming task of writing code, such as deploying scripts for special processing in the context of a build; deploying programs/scripts in any of the BSF supported programming languages embedded in JSPs; and allowing to implement extensions to the XSL transformations implemented in any of the BSF- supported programming languages.

The BSF v 2.4.0 distribution also comes with samples demonstrating key features of the framework.

A subproject of Apache Jakarta, the Bean Scripting Framework (BSF) is a set of Java classes which provides scripting language support within Java applications, and access to Java objects and methods from scripting languages. BSF allows one to write JSPs in languages other than Java while providing access to the Java class library. In addition, BSF permits any Java application to be implemented in part (or dynamically extended) by a language that is embedded within it. This is achieved by providing an APIthat permits calling scripting language engines from within Java, as well as an object registry that exposes Java objects to these scripting language engines. For more information visit http://jakarta.apache.org/bsf/