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So, I was an early user of Groovy and have been using Beanshell (mostly very happily) for years. There is an interesting dyanmic between the two. The Groovy folks seem to like Beanshell, and, in fact, I have never heard a bad thing about Beanshell from them, and hear a number of quite good things. On the other hand, Beanshell developers and users seem to slam Groovy every chance they get. I have watched Pat (owner and lead developer for Beanshell) get downright vitriolic about Groovy -- mostly because people seemed to be paying attention to it.

It all got funny again a couple days ago with Ed Burnette's post, BeanShell: groovier than Groovy in which he asserts such nice things like the upcoming 1.0 from groovy is a second (huh?) 1.0 because they released beta 1 two years ago. That is fscking hilarious. Presently Beanshell is at 2.0 beta 4 and stalled as far as anyone in the community can tell. Beanshell 2.0 beta 1 was released in... 2003. No worries, they are acting quickly, right?

Well, if the lead developer for Beanshell has any say...

On Mar 3, 2006, at 7:51 AM, mikael-aronsson wrote:

> Our old friend bsh-2.0b4.jar  look's like being the end of  
> Beanshell maybe ? at least it does not look like there is much  
> going on, or am I wrong ?

The wheels have been turning slowly recently, however the JSR group  
will get moving soon and that will generate a lot of activity.


Pat

The Groovy JSR is generally considered to be what crushed the rate of Groovy development (and lead to its present stability, on the other hand). I hope it doesn't have the same order of magnitude slowdown on Beanshell as, as far as I can tell, the last beanshell commit was just a few days shy of six months ago, and there were no checkins for almost a year in 2004/2005 despite around 20 patches submitted from users to fix known (and acknowledged) issues in that time period..

The best part about all this, of course, is that the "dynamic language" with the highest rate of adoption amongst self-espoused "Java Developers" (pronounced "IDEA Developers") is probably either ruby or python, despite the whole "change of platform." Meanwhile, Rhino is getting embedded in Sun's jdk 1.6 (or j6sdk11 as Sun might call it, we never know), and it rocks, and javascript is damned hot again in general. You want a sleeping giant? You might have one.

Ah, the drama!