Scripting For Java

Tcl has been initially developed as an embeddable command language to provide what we now call ”scripting” to complex applications. The ”scripting” or ”high level language” approach to provide control to applications from command lines, configurations files or ”macros” has been very successful and a major winning case for Tcl. In the last six years, Java appeared as a programming language and runtime environment, and – due to many factors – gained a large popularity in the area of business computing. Therefore, the need to embed high-level languages for various reasons into Java-based applications was desired as much as it was for C/C++ and other low level language based applications. Java has sometimes been seen as a ”pariah” within the Tcl community, but still there are very useful projects and publications exploring various aspects regarding the relationship between Tcl and Java. The Tcl/Java integration projects (tclBlend, Jacl) provide an embeddable Tcl interpreter written entirely in Java and a very powerful interaction between Java and the scripting level. As we have been and are using Tcl very much in our projects, Jacl would have been the logical choice for a scripting environment for Java. Nonetheless, we decided to do a comparison and evaluation project to compare Jacl with other popular scripting environments for Java such as Jython (having python as scripting language) and Rhino (JavaScript). Here, we compare these environments based on a wide set of criteria such as popularity, library support, performance, ease-of-integration, memory footprints, licensing models and so on.