I had a look at Groovy. For the moment I'm not going to switch, but the main reason is that I don't want to spend time learning yet another programming language. Some more comments below.
Op Tuesday 05 February 2008 17:38:01 schreef Ted Dunning: > > 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. For me, that is limited to the with statement and conditional statement in Python 2.5 that are not in Jython 2.2. > The small developer community is both a cause of this and a reason that it > won't be repaired any time soon. I think the main reason for the small development community some time agon on Jython is that 2.1 was simply too good. Jython development towards 2.5 seems to be nicely on its way again now. > 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. That's an advantage and a disadvantage: more distance from java means easier programming, allthough probably not much. Jython has more distance from Java than Groovy, and indeed calling Jython from Java is not nice. I have mainly used Jython by simply adding Java libraries to the class path, and writing jython glue code around these. Then calling back into Jython is not an issue, also because inheritance from Java works well in Jython, despite the distance. > d) development tools for Jython are poor while IntelliJ Idea supports > debugging and incremental compilation of Groovy as a first class language. For development I only need the editor to be able to follow a traceback, from a test run in whatever language. With a bit of setting up, jEdit does that nicely, both in Java and Jython (and probably in Groovy, too). And Jython needs a bit of help to run all unit tests in a directory structure, on the Java side that is directly usable from ant an junit. > 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. Groovy is quite readable, so I wouldn't mind to give it a try to provide patches. Regards, Paul Elschot > 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? > >
