WARNING: This blog entry was imported from my old blog on blogs.sun.com (which used different blogging software), so formatting and links may not be correct.
My co-conspirators on Project Semplice, John Kline and
Herbert Czymontek, have both recently left Sun. Rest assured, I'm not going anywhere. But where does that leave Project Semplice?
Well, the spirit of the project was to support scripting on the VM. We started our research with BASIC, but the vision all along was to design things in such a way that we could support multiple scripting languages, without starting from scratch each time. The tooling aspect was my responsibility, and I'm happy to say it has not been in vain. With the hiring of the JRuby developers, I've been focusing on how to adapt everything to support Ruby, and it's going really well.
I'll post a second blog entry on that shortly.
Back to BASIC. Like most software at Sun, open source is the obvious strategy and we have started the process. On the other hand, just "dumping code on the community" is not likely to be successful, so we're looking for interest and support to decide how to proceed.
In any case, as the blog title suggests, the project is not dead. It was a research project, we've learned a lot, and the technology is now forming the basis for some great new scripting tools coming your way very soon. Rising out of the ashes, so to speak! We'll have more to show at JavaPolis in a few weeks, so keep your eyes peeled!
hi tor,
ReplyDeletenice to know that it is not dead.
so, how big is the jruby team inside sun ? will semplice/jruby make it easier to program for jRails ?
BR,
~A
When will we be given a chance to take a look at it? I still wonder why this particulary syntax is resurected. As humoursly descriped here
ReplyDelete"BASIC - The horny divorcee that lives next door. Her specialty is seducing young boys and it seems she is always readily available for them. She teaches them many amazing things, or at least they seem amazing because it is their) first experience. She is not that young herself, but because she was their first lover the boys always remember her fondly. Her cooking and sewing skills are mediocre, but largely irrelevant, it's the frolicking that the boys like. The opinion that adults have of Mrs. BASIC is varied. Shockingly, some fathers actually introduce their own sons to this immoral woman! But generally the more righteous adults try to correct the badly influenced young men by introducing them to well behaved women like Miss Pascal".
What's with the code of the VB-replacement? Does the Semplice-Source-Code and Binaries still exists? Would be nice, if there could be created a new team around this project on Sourceforge.net or dev.java.net
ReplyDeleteWith the support of Java, Basic, JRuby, Groovy, etc. it seems like Sun is positioning the JVM to be more like what .NET should have been... a true open source platform that runs multiple languages independently. I think this will be an interesting long term positioning move that will help Java maintain its position and stability in the market, both now and 10 years from. What would be interesting is if long-term Java components can be made interchangeable with components written in another language yet supported by the VM, if they can all run in the VM at the same time, or if they have to run in separate VM's if they could talk back and forth (via RMI, serialization, whatever). Interesting direction the Java platform has taken. Cheers.
ReplyDelete