Specialty scripting languages

on this topic
March 16, 2001, 09:41 AM —  Unix Insider — 


"BeanShell is a small, free, embeddable, Java source interpreter with object scripting language features, written in Java...You can use BeanShell interactively for Java experimentation and debugging or as a simple scripting engine for your applications. In short: BeanShell is a dynamically interpreted Java, plus some useful stuff."


That's the introduction on the BeanShell Website; it's an accurate one. Pat Niemeyer, author of Exploring Java, wrote BeanShell, an interactive loosening of Java whose use continues to grow. The Java Development Environment (JDE) for Emacs and XEmacs already includes it, and a couple of other high-profile products will likely name it their embedded scripting language this winter.


Niemeyer recognizes that at this point, "JPython is certainly the best-known scripting language for Java." JPython is the Python variant often mentioned in Regular Expressions. BeanShell fans find Niemeyer's interpreter far more natural, though, simply because it's so close to standard Java. Moreover, Niemeyer claims, "BeanShell is tiny in comparison (about 200 KB) and rapidly becoming just as complete."


After an early phase in which Niemeyer did all the work to establish BeanShell's character, he moved its maintenance to SourceForge. "We can now start taking advantage of some of the hundreds of developers who are on the mailing list in a more direct way," he said. Version 1.1 should be in early beta as you read this.


NQL grows rapidly

Network Query Language (NQL) has emerged from "five years of stealth development" and is growing rapidly, according to chief technologist David Pallmann. NQL Inc., a publicly traded development house, formally released the best of its core technology as the NQL programming language this April. NQL looks like many other Algol-derived languages. It approaches the conciseness of Perl -- not with Perl's rather undisciplined abbreviations and context dependences, but through creative application of a syntactic stack alongside a conventional syntax of keywords and variables. Thus a bare while implicitly tests the current value on top of the stack. This makes for quite a few handy idioms for common programming constructs.


NQL's advertised virtue is its four large built-in capabilities, available to competing scripting languages only through the use of external modules:

  • Communications
  • Conversion
  • Automation
  • Intelligent behavior


NQL needs those domains to give its customers the custom development that it has packaged into a standalone language. They combine to make NQL's specialty "intelligent agents" that tackle notoriously thorny development challenges, such as bank-account consolidation.

Sign up for ITworld's Daily newsletter
Follow ITworld on Twitter @IT_world

I like it!
Post a comment
The content of this field is kept private and will not be shown publicly.
  • Allowed HTML tags: <a> <em> <strong> <cite> <code> <ul> <ol> <li> <dl> <dt> <dd>
  • Lines and paragraphs break automatically.
peer-to-peer

jfruh
Apple syncing patent can't come soon enough

pasmith
New Twitter features borrow from 3rd party clients

Esther Schindler
Open Source Changes the Software Acquisition Process

mikelgan
How to set up continuous podcast play on the new iTunes

David Strom
Five important Windows 7 mobility features

sjvn
Guard your Wi-Fi for your own sake                        

Sandra Henry-Stocker
Grepping on Whole Words

 

Sidekick: The Good News & the Bad News
Either way you look at it Microsoft Data Center management did not follow standards or best practices in this failure. In which case it makes me wonder more about the outsourcing of corporate data much less personal data.
- mburton325

Join the conversation here

The Daily Tip

The Daily TipQuick, practical advice for IT pros. Made fresh daily.

Hot tips:

Want to cash in on your IT savvy? Send your tip to tips@itworld.com. If we post it, we'll send you a $25 Amazon e-gift card.

Newsletters

Subscribe to ITWORLD TODAY and receive the latest IT news and analysis.

I would like to receive offers via email from ITworld partners.
By clicking submit you agree to the terms and conditions outlined in ITworld's privacy policy.
Featured Sponsor

AISO founders envisioned a Web hosting company that was environmentally friendly. While the company employed energy-efficient innovations like solar panels, its infrastructure produced unacceptable power and cooling requirements. Find out how AISO leveraged AMD technology to overcome their challenge in this case study white paper.

In this whitepaper, Scalar explores the opportunity to change the landscape with respect to mission critical databases built around Oracle. Leveraging technologies such as Linux, high-end commodity processing power and Oracle RAC technology to architect, design, build and maintain database infrastructure that delivers maximum availability, reliability and performance at a fraction of traditional cost.

On a typical day, weather.com, the Web site for The Weather Channel in Atlanta, serves up between 15 million and 20 million page views. But in September 2004, when back-to-back hurricanes ransacked Florida, the peak traffic on one day more than tripled: over 70 million page views by more than 7 million unique visitors. Read the full success story now.

Marketplace