Sun just announced J2SE 6 and many java bloggers are relaying the information..
Something important for the web development community in this release is the support for scripting languages. In fact, the trend, that has been started with Java Hotswap, is to create tools that allow Web Frameworks to be more productive for developers.
Indeed, developers are tired of the develop / build / deploy cycle, and would prefer to work with the PHP-like develop / reload in browser development cycle. Well, scripting is a step in that direction, and would allow to :
- Keep the domain layer as strongly-typed POJOs, that are unit-tested and constantly refactored to keep a good design.
- Write the Web Controllers (the C in MVC) in any scripting language (the view being written in any already-existing templating language, such as JSP or Freemarker). This allows rapid development and since the view is hardly reusable anyways, it’s better to throw it away and recreate something from scratch when needed.
Efforts toward that direction have already been started, as relayed by these few blog entries and articles :
- Christian groovin’ with webwork 2
- Groovin’ with Webwork 2
- Groovin’ with Webwork 2 : using Groovy as actions
So, now the next step is to have universal support for that kind of development, and have better IDE support that will allow refactoring both in the scripted controllers and the view (JSP, Freemarker..). In fact, there is currently no way to make sure nothing is broken besides writing functional (Selenium, Canoo Webtest, HttpUnit…) tests.