Spring dynamic language support could include Spring Python

[gregturn]

Check out http://www.testearly.com/2008/08/07/springs-so-groovy/. It appears Spring has support for JRuby, Groovy, and Beanshell. These are all nice JVM-based solutions, meaning the users can tap into Spring through these tools easily. We need to keep Jython in the back of our minds as well. It would be nice in the future to bridge between Spring framework and Spring Python.

I wonder...if Spring Python was reachable through Jython, could we compile some type of jar file that would allow JVM-based solutions to use our python solutions? springpython.jar is a very interesting idea.

If someone was picking between JdbcTemplate and DatabaseTemplate, I can understand not wanting to compete. But if you talk about remotely communicating from a groovy client to a python server (through pyro/hessian/web services), things start to sound nice! This may be the hook to plug python services into a grails app.

[gregturn]

I just took a poke at running the regression test suite using jython instead of python. I quickly discovered that running against CPython2.2 specs means no "import logging" routine. I may comment out (or stub in) a logging library to see how much further I get.

But all that is beside the point. I just read http://zyasoft.com/pythoneering/2008...jython-25.html, which was posted two months ago. The jython team has pulled in ANTLR as their parsing engine, and appear to working madly to get a jython release which support python2.5. That will open the door to Spring Python running on jython, and thus the JVM. That gives me hope.

I like JVM-based options, because things are easier to link together, and we have more options to get several "right tool for the right job"'s integrating things into comprehensive solutions.

[rmiles]

There's some ongoing work to put the same dynamic language 'beans' into Spring.NET, and one of the supported languages there is very likely to be IronPython 2.

Is there anything obvious that may cause us 'fun' when running Spring Python on IronPython 2?

[gregturn]

I haven't really run ironpython much, so I don't know. I think I tried something on it once, and was turned off by lack of support. This is probably 2-year old news, and things change.

That is definitely a question that needs an answer, because I agree with SpringSource's approach towards supporting as many platforms with as many choices as possible.

At home, all my home computers run ubuntu linux (except my wife's), so I currently have a hard time researching the answer to this one. I would offer to download python and ironpython, except her machine is slow as molasses when trying to use iTunes. It needs a reload, or a replacement.

[rmiles]

No problems, I'm actually working the Scripted object support in Spring.NET so I'll add a JIRA feature request, unscheduled for now, to investigate and get Spring Python running from within that environment.

[Lawouach]

I think you guys should be careful about wanting to support all those platforms. IP is extremely unpredictable when it comes to host libraries that were written for CPython. For instance Spring Python does a lot of introspection using the inspect module that may lead to many surprises.

I do understand that it makes sense both from a community and probably ultimately business purpose but don't hold your breathe for a smooth ride

It'd be quite fun however

[rmiles]

Yeah, I've had fun myself with IP... that's why it's a jira with no set release just yet

Just something to consider, especially from an interoperability standpoint with Spring.NET.