Scripting Support - why not BSF or JSR223?

[markwestcott]

Hi all,

I was just wondering if there was any particular reason Rhino has been integrated directly rather than using BSF or JSR223 to make Alfresco scriptable?  Would get Alfresco Python, Ruby, Groovy etc support, but particularly thinking of JRuby and the potential for JRuby on Rails webscripts.

But don't want to dive in and give it a go if there's a good architectural reason it hasn't happened yet.

Mark

[pmonks]

There's been a lot of discussion internally on this topic, and everyone is in violent agreement that it's the right thing to do.  Unfortunately it's a fair chunk of work to make scripting pluggable everywhere (including unusual places like the inline scripts in workflow definitions), so it's one of those things that hasn't bubbled up the stack yet.

Please let us know what your priorities are - we're always keen to hear from the community!

FWIW my personal opinion is that providing scripting language choice in Web Scripts only as a first step, then gradually extending it out to all of the other places that Alfresco uses scripting (to amortise the development effort over time) would be a reasonable thing to do.

[mikef]

FYI.
…."In Alfresco 2.1 a mechanism for adding additional scripting engines has been added. It is now possible to completely replace or augment the existing JavaScript implemenation with others such as PHP or Ruby."…….

See http://wiki.alfresco.com/wiki/JavaScript_API#How_is_Scripting_integrated_into_Alfresco.3F for details.