Ignacio Coloma

Scripting languages have recently garnered a bit of attention. With the arrival of Groovy and Jython, writing scripts merged with Java is more natural than Ant. Using XML to call Java methods has always been forced, mostly because it's hard to express flow, conditional expressions, and custom Java code in a markup language (although things have improved a lot since Ant 1.5). Why a scripting language? Well, if I have a completely blown IDE for Java programming, using Jython or Groovy can look backwards. You can code in fewer lines (though not much less), but I want the imports written automatically. I want compiler warnings while coding and I need refactorings. Plug-ins for these languages are still outside of Java IDE's capabilities. But there are times where you just don't have a full IDE configured. Think about jobs that should be automated to be agile, or about s... (more)