Designed by JCP | Typing discipline Dynamic, strong | |
Paradigm Object-oriented, scripting First appeared 1999; 18 years ago (1999) Stable release 1.3.0 / August 2003; 13 years ago (2003-08) Preview release 2.0b6 / February 18, 2016; 12 months ago (2016-02-18) | ||
BeanShell is a Java-like scripting language, invented by Patrick Niemeyer. It runs in the Java Runtime Environment (JRE) and uses a variation of the Java syntax, in addition to scripting commands and syntax.
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Features
While BeanShell allows its users to define functions that can be called from within a script, its underpinning philosophy has been to not pollute its syntax with too many extensions and "syntactic sugar", thereby ensuring that code written for a Java compiler can almost always be executed interpretively by BeanShell without any changes and, almost just as much, vice versa. This makes BeanShell a popular testing and debugging tool for the JVM platform.
BeanShell supports scripted objects as simple method closures like those in Perl and JavaScript.
BeanShell is an open source project and has been incorporated into many applications, such as Apache OpenOffice, Apache Ant, WebLogic Server Application Server, jWork.ORG DataMelt, Apache JMeter, jEdit, ImageJ, JUMP GIS, Apache Taverna and many others. BeanShell provides an easy to integrate API. It can also be run in command-line mode or within its own graphical environment.
History
The first versions of BeanShell (0.96, 1.0) were released by Patrick Niemeyer in 1999, followed by a series of versions. BeanShell 1.3.0 was released in August 2003. Version 2.0b1 was released in September 2003, culminating with version 2.0b4 in May 2005, which as of January 2015 is the newest release posted on the official webpage.
BeanShell has been included in the Linux distribution Debian since 1999.
BeanShell was undergoing standardization through the Java Community Process (JCP) under JSR 274.
Following the JCP approval of the BeanShell JSR Review Ballot in June 2005, no visible activity was taking place around BeanShell. The JSR 274 status is "Dormant".
Java REPL (jshell) is currently targeted for Java 9.
A fork of BeanShell, BeanShell2, was created in May 2007 on the Google Code website. The beanshell2 project has made a number of fixes and enhancements to BeanShell and multiple releases. As of January 2015, the latest version of beanshell2 is v2.1.8 released February 2014.
In December 2012, following a proposal to accept BeanShell as an Apache incubator project, BeanShell was licensed to the Apache Software Foundation and migrated to the Apache Extras, changing the license to Apache License 2.0. The project was accepted, and projected to become part of the Apache Commons.
Due to changes in the developers' personal circumstances, the BeanShell community did however not complete the move to Apache, but remained at Apache Extras. The project has since released BeanShell 2.0b5, which is used by Apache OpenOffice and Apache Taverna.
A Windows automated installer, BeanShell Double-Click, was created in 2013. It includes desktop integration features.