I spent quite a bit of time recently evaluating alternatives for scripting
in Java.  Jython was my presumptive choice at the beginning of the
evaluation.

I eventually chose Groovy.

The major issues that made Jython unacceptable for my project were:

 a) no significant development progress over a period of years and still
only a tiny developer community.

 b) related to (a) is the fact that jython is like a python time capsule.
Many of the features that make python attractive are missing from jython.
The small developer community is both a cause of this and a reason that it
won't be repaired any time soon.

 c) Groovy's integration with java is far superior to Jython's.  Jython can
call java, but java has more trouble calling Jython.  With groovy, the
interface is completely transparent in both directions.

 d) development tools for Jython are poor while IntelliJ Idea supports
debugging and incremental compilation of Groovy as a first class language.

Frankly, I am not at all unhappy with the decision and would advocate use of
Groovy in mahout over Jython if there is a choice that has to be made.  Of
course, if some people want one and some the other then this is open source
we are talking about.

On 2/5/08 12:12 AM, "Paul Elschot" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> Dear readers,
> 
> I had a quick look at Elefant. The GUI has a prominent Python
> menu entry, and Python has a nice place in its architecture.
> 
> I've been using Jython, the java implementation of Python, only occasionally,
> but I'd like to use it again. The biggest advantage of Jython is its almost
> transparent java interface, i.e. there is no need at all to write wrappers
> around
> java libraries, and it provides the ease of Python for scripting.
> 
> Is there more interest in using Jython here?
> 
> Regards,
> Paul Elschot

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