In Portofino, we use GroovyScriptEngine which takes care of automatically recompiling changed files (taking dependencies into account). A typical application has dozens of such files and it works well for us. However, those are full-blown classes (even if many of them trivially extend a given base class) rather than expressions. But you could still collect all the expressions related to a given resource or page into a single class quite easily if performance becomes a problem.
On Tue, 27 Oct 2020 at 16:08, Edmond Kemokai <ekemo...@gmail.com> wrote: > Hi Jason, > > I am working on a product that uses Groovy as a dynamic scripting language > within a Java web app and have been contending with this concern as well. > > Some things to consider: > > Is it possible to consolidate these 100s of expressions into a fully > qualified named class? > With this approach you could then create a singleton of such a class and > retain that in memory via the java web app session. You could then map the > expression evaluation to some sort of naming scheme (basically a bunch of > if/else blocks), or just map each expression to a unique function. > > This of course takes away some of the flexibility of being able to run > arbitrary code. > > As to the overhead of constantly compiling these expressions, I can't > speak to actual numbers but there is definitely an overhead, you'll > probably need to do your own jvm performance profiling to determine whether > it is an actual problem. > > In my case I am using the java scripting API to evaluate Groovy code, with > that API it is possible to obtain a compiled instance of the code ( > javax.script.CompiledScript ) that can be rerun multiple times without > recompiling. This is an alternative way to address compilation overhead. > > Hope this helps. > > Regards > Edmond > > >
