Scripting languages in Java – manipulating an EMF model
I’m currently attempting to embed a scripting engine into a Java application. The Java Scripting API means this exercise should be quite straightforward (at least to get something up and running) and there is a huge choice of script languages to choose from so one of them ought to match my requirements, right?
I’m taking baby steps while I explore the space of possible options. So far I’ve prototyped an expression evaluator that accepts data in the form of simple Java framework objects and allows boolean expressions to be evaluated over them. In today’s baby step I thought I’d try and manipulate some non-framework Java objects built with an EMF model that I’m currently working on and two different scripting languages, Groovy and Rhino. Groovy is a scripting language that has grown out of the Java community in response to Python and Ruby. Rhino is a Javascript engine implemented in Java from the Mozilla foundation that is bundled as the default scripting engine in the Java6 JDK. I got somewhere with Groovy but got completely stumped with Rhino because I just couldn’t load my custom classes.