Oh, one more thing pops to mind... use of scripting languages from the Java environment of JSP is rather unnatural. Passing script variables back and forth between java and the scripting language environment is messy and needs some hacks to jasper. Chuck or Victor should be able to provide more detail.
a) ad "usage of scripting languages in the context of JSP is rather unnatural": why *unnatural*, for God's sake? I see the contrary to be true, opening up JSPs to solving problems in non-Java languages as well, *if* fitting. As important as Java is, there are applications/problems where non-Java-languages may be preferable, e.g. from scripting to interpreting dynamically created statements.
[BTW, Microsoft allows to use *any* scripting language for their ASP, ie. the JSP counterpart on Windows: they support any WSH-scripting language out of the box.]
Could not resist to put few words. I think it is better to let each scripting language to connect to JSP directly without intermediate layer of BSF. The issue here is not a performance (I doubt that BSF layer has any significant impact here) but simplicity and convenience of direct plugin implementation over using BSF as super-plugin that comes with own plugin children.
After spending few years to implement all MSIE quirks and extensions for JavaScript and DOM in a pure Java browser while keeping an option to use Jython on web pages I think any intermediate library will either harm a particular language power or lead to extremely complex and unmaintainable library.
Microsoft tried to allow to use VBScript in HTML and keep things compatible with Netscape DOM bindings for JavaScript and the end result is the complete and final mess in DOM scripting in MSIE that I suspect nobody understand. Server side ASP is not better. Yes, you can write ASP in JavaScript or Perl, but often you end up with terrible hacks just to subvert ASP VBScript-based conventions into a particular language.
Similarly Python and JavaScript are just too different to have a simple library that covers everything.
Regards, Igor
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