Grails, JRuby on Rails, etc... scripting languages/environments and Geronimo integration

[Joe Bohn]

I think it was Kevan that originally proposed we might consider 
integrating some of these scripting languages/environments in with 
Geronimo ... possibly for Geronimo 2.2.

I've started to look into a few of these technologies with an eye toward 
integration in Geronimo.  I'm not coming into this with any first hand 
experience in these technologies (beyond what I've read and experimented 
with thus far)  ... so any informed opinions are certainly welcome.


So far, this is my initial take on these technologies and the 
feasibility of integration with Geronimo:

Grails framework - This is a self contained framework that leverages 
groovy for scripting.  It uses a rails like code by convention approach 
to generate and host web applications.   It is licensed under Apache. It 
embeds Jetty for hosting the generated web applications but can also 
export WAR files which can be then deployed application servers like 
Geronimo.  There is an article that gives a nice description on how to 
utilize Grails to generate a web app and deploy it into Geronimo 
(http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/opensource/library/os-ag-grails/).
As far as integration with Geronimo goes, I'm not sure that there is 
much to we can do.  I guess we could document this in our wiki or 
perhaps generate a plugin (or whatever the Grails term is) so that the 
geronimo deployment plan can be generated rather than created manually, 
but I'm not sure that is worth the effort.  There doesn't seem to be a 
good place for programmatic integration with regard to the framework itself.

JRuby on Rails - My understanding is that this is basically a Ruby 
implementation that runs on the Java VM (the JRuby portion) and 
leverages the Rails framework.  It is licensed under CPL/GPL/LGPL.  In 
many ways it is similar to Grails using an embedded web server to 
facilitate a rapid application development environment ... this time 
built upon the JRuby language interpreter.  Here again, I suspect we can 
provide some directions so that an exported war could be deployed in 
Geronimo (or perhaps a plugin to generate geronimo deployment plans) but 
there doesn't seem to be much in the way of direct integration that we 
can provide.

There are other frameworks as well.  Trails is one that I stumbled on 
which is also in the same vein as Grails with a focus on definition of 
the domain model and generating the rest of the app dynamically.

However, this has me thinking that perhaps I should focus more on the 
language interpreters and integrating those (JRuby, Groovy, etc...) 
rather than the frameworks.

Thoughts?

Any ideas on PHP and if this would be another potential area for 
integration?

Joe