Revival of BeanShell

One of the first scripting languages for the JVM - BeanShell - is dormant since 2005.

This is a pity, because the inventor Patrick Niemeyer - Pat - did a great job. Registered at sourceforge back in 2000 it was included since in Open-Office, jEdit, JMeter, and recently in the Android scripting layer. Even a JSR was approved for standardization (now JSR-274 is officially marked 'inactive'). I personally use it in my IDE for prototyping code snippets on a regualr basis.

Back in 2007 Franklin Schmidt made a fork named BeanShell2. Some bugs were fixed but there were no releases, so it never got big attention.

So it's time to change this. I asked Franklin if i could push out a release and he accepted. I contributed some minor fixes and published a first build, hoping to bring some attention back to this fine piece of software.

There is still much work to do. More bug reports, feature requests, and patches are needed to improve the software. But the first steps are made.

I favour BeanShell because you can script without generating class files - so perm space isn't bloated. You only need class generation if you want to extend existing java classes (not interfaces). This is a big advantage for server side or container scripting.

You are welcome to contribute!