Groovy, JRuby, Scala, and Clojure are some of the most widely used alternative Java Virtual Machine (JVM) languages today. I spoke with several developers who adopted one of these languages in a Java-based project. This article ("Alternative JVM Languages for Java Projects") tells their stories - which language they picked, why they picked it, and how they integrated it with their existing Java code base or infrastructure.
This article includes stories from the following people:
- Moss Collum: Gradually migrating code from Java to Groovy
- Kris Nuttycombe: Starting to use Scala to write tests for a Java project
- Najati Imam: Seamlessly deploying JRuby on Rails in an existing Java infrastructure
- Bob McWhirter: Combining some of the best parts of Java with Ruby language to build something new: TorqueBox
- Dan Chamberlain: Using Clojure to more naturally and succinctly model the business problem domain
This article appears in the September/October 2011 issue of Better Software Magazine.
Thanks to Heather Shanholtzer, Lee Copeland, Jean Middleton, and Cheryl Burke at Better Software Magazine for many things - the opportunity to write this article, top-notch editing, and valuable feedback. Thanks to my friends Alex Baranosky, Moss Collum, Paul Infield-Harm, Joe Leo, Jason Reid and colleagues at Cyrus Innovation for their formative suggestions for the article.