I found a very interesting series of articles about alternate languages for the JRE on IBM developerWorks.
The following languages were discussed:
While Jython, JRuby, Rhino and NetRexx are ports of existing languages to the JRE, Groovy and Nice are complete new language based entirely on the Java programming APIs.
Groovy blends some of the most useful features of Ruby, Python, and Smalltalk. But still conserves a core syntax based on the Java language.
Groovy supports the following features:
- Dynamic types
- Closures
- Regex syntax similar to Perl
- Native syntax for Lists and Maps
- Operator Overloading to simplify working with datatypes Collections and Maps
- Polymorphic iteration and Autoboxing
- Providing a shell interpreter
- Compiles straight to Java bytecode and works cleanly with all existing Java objects and libraries
All in all Groovy is exactly like Java should have been.
It’s nice (pun intended) to see how the JRE supports more and more alternate languages. The only language I still miss is JPerl. To by-pass the time waiting for it, I’ll play with Inline::Java and PLJava.
