Thanks to some recent work from Joe Eckard OFBiz now has pretty good support for the Groovy scripting language.
While this is kind of interesting on its own, what was really interesting was to find out (after not looking at groovy for probably about 4 years) that it supports nearly all of the Java syntax, and in addition offers significant syntax sugar and functionality, including the dot syntax we like in FTL and various OFBiz XML elements/ attributes (though it is way better than any of those...).
The reason that point peaked my interest was because my main reason for sticking with bsh as the scripting language for OFBiz was that it follows the Java syntax and works with most JavaScript funny business too, and thus reduces the learning curve for both back-end and front- end developers.
The downsides to bsh are somewhat significant, starting with the fact that it isn't so much a community driven project as it is one man's pet project, and to that point hasn't had a release in years. The functionality and performance of Beanshell also leaves a lot to be desired, especially compared to what Groovy now offers.
In spite of the fact that Groovy has received so much attention in the press and such in recent months (well, for over a year now), and there are funny/cool things like "Groovy on Grails" that exist, Groovy really is a good scripting language and has some impressive features to help with development efficiency, and makes up for many of the things that make Java and Beanshell cumbersome to use.
So, what I am proposing is that we change the best practice recommended scripting language in OFBiz from Beanshell to Groovy. This would mean eventually moving all .bsh files to .groovy files (which is fortunately easy because most, if not all, of the OFBiz bsh files will run as-is through groovy, though it would be good to clean things up as we go...).
The point of this thread is to open up the topic for discussion before doing anything like a vote.
So, please research, then comment! -David
