Thursday, January 03, 2008

Jython's Back, Baby!

Well it's been a long hard slog for the Jython team. Once thought dead, they seemed to pick up steam more and more over the past year. They got out a long awaited 2.2 release and started to work on many missing 2.3, 2.4, and 2.5 features. They started tackling new parsers and compilers. They spoke with me and other folks at Sun about the future of dynamic languages on the JVM. And above all, they've been working their asses off, having sprints and codefests and hacking away on every corner of Jython.

It looks like their hard work is paying off. Jim Baker reports that they have successfully run Django on Jython. They're using bleeding edge revisions of both Jython and Django, and there's a bit more work to be done, but hey, lots of folks thought it would be impossible. Haven't we heard that somewhere before?

Hats off to whole Jython team and their obviously excellent community for making this a reality. This is just the beginning!

7 comments:

Daniel Berger said...

Seems the work on JRuby (and subsequent attention) was a catalyst for the Jython folks. Unless it was just a coincidence. :)

And, hey, where's Jerl? ;)

Jim Baker said...

Number of factors here. Certainly it helps that Java has shaken off the bad vibe of J2EE. And we're starting to see Java not as the new Cobol, but the new C for systems programming, as Dick Wall mentioned in the last Java Posse. But unlike C - or at least C without Intel libraries or whatever - Java has a well-defined memory and concurrency model, and one that maps quite nicely to the new hardware realities of multicore and possibly manycore.

But JRuby definitely has been a positive influence too. RoR on JRuby showed how much interest there is in combining an easy-to-use web app framework with all the power of the Java ecosystem. (Even if that just meant sneaking in the jar.) Now that we Django running on Jython, there are some interesting use cases. Like using Drools (aka JBoss Business Rules, who calls it that?) for authorization modeling. And other examples like that.

Ryan said...

Let us know when it can run twisted :)

Juan said...

Congratulation, it´s a very good new. :-)
We love Python, and we wait the same JRuby features in Netbeans.

james_027 said...

+1 @Juan comment :)

Michael Easter said...

Congrats to the Jython team and kudos to Charles for the enthusiastic post. That's truly refreshing...

Anonymous said...

nice