About

Bex script is a (yet another) scripting language for the Java platform. It is heavily based on another great scripting language BeanShell. I've been using BeanShell for years and grown to like the language very much. However, there are a few details about BeanShell that I would like to be different. Bex script is my attempt to fix these issues and hopefully give some ideas to the BeanShell developers.

Bex script was originally called bee script. Unfortunately, there seems to be another scripting language for java called BEE script, which is part of some kind of middleware server. This language has nothing to do with the language being described here so to avoid confusion I decided to rename my language to bex script before making a 1.0 release. The new name also describes the language better because it is an abbreviation of block expression which is a fundamental construct in this language.

Features

Some highlights:

Why another scripting language?

I use JVM scripting languages to glue, debug and test existing Java code. Therefore, for me the most important property of a scripting language is how well it integrates with code written in Java. I want to use the Java APIs from the scripting language at least as easily as from Java language itself. In addition I do not want to learn another language specific library when all the functionality in the world is already available in Java APIs.

Most of the languages that are ports of some existing scripting language to the JVM tend to have their own libraries and they often encourage developers to use the native libraries instead of the Java APIs. Accessing the Java APIs is either slower or otherwise more awkward. To me the native libraries are just bloat that I do not need. This rules out Jython, JRuby and Rhino as my preferred scripting language.

There are also scripting languages that have been designed for the JVM from the beginning. Groovy for instance is an interesting language. However, based on the version compability issues and the bad publicity it has recently received, I'm not ready to start using it just yet. Pnuts is another even more interesting language. I must confess that I haven't really tried it, but it surely looks like it could be used as a replacement for Java. They say it is fast and fully featured so one of these days I'll probably try to write something real with it. However, for the moment, me requirements for a scripting language is that it is small and easily embeddable. To me, Pnuts feels like it want's to be a "real language" and not just some glue or debugging interface inside some Java based server system.

This leaves me with BeanShell. Now BeanShell has been one of the best tools I've ever had. I can not imagine working with Java code without BeanShell smoothing out the rough edges. I've used BeanShell when debugging and repairing live systems, in unit testing, for writing system testing tools, as a JSP replacement, as an XML replacement for configuration and in many other places, you get the picture.

Over the years I've also modified BeanShell a bit to better suit my needs. However, I feel that there are some issues with BeanShell that cannot be fixed with just a few simple hacks. First, as they say on BeanShell's home page, BeanShell is a "Java source interpreter with object scripting language features". I don't want to interpret my Java source, I prefer to compile it with javac. So my BeanShell code is often heavily based on the "scripting language features" using untyped variables, scripted objects and "clever" hacks with namespaces and special variables. Still, I feel that the scripting language features are a second class citizen in BeanShell with the main emphasis on being fully compliant with Java source.

The language space is rapidly evolving with new languages having exciting new features popping up constantly. With BeanShell I feel I'm missing part of the action since it is so married with the features of Java. There seems to be a considerable amount of friction against new features in the BeanShell community. Most of them seem to be happy with the feature set available in the Java language and some of them feel that adding new scripting language features (like closures for instance) would clutter the language and make it less attractive.

I don't feel this way. I couldn't care less about the source compatibility with Java. I want to use all the fancy new innovations in the computer language space that let me express my thoughts more elegantly in less lines of code. With bex script I hope I can achieve the usefulness of BeanShell combined with the expressive power of Lisp. You have to set your goals high, right? :)

What next?

If you have read this far, you might be interested in seeing what it looks like. The examples page demonstrates some of the features of the language. After that please proceed to the download page and start using the language and contributing to its development.

Author

Juha Lindström
juhal {at} users.sourceforge.net


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