More people within corporations are using scripting languages to rapidly assemble business applications, sometimes even taking an existing application template and modifying it, said Scott Guthrie, Microsoft's product unit manager for Web platform and tools.
"There's a very large community of people who identify themselves as scripters or self-taught," said Guthrie. "That's a key customer segment we're going after."
Java creator Sun earlier this year launched Coyote, an effort to make scripting languages function within NetBeans, the Sun-backed open-source tool platform. NetBeans right now is for Java development only, but the Coyote project will let people write code in Groovy, Jython and eventually other scripting languages.
These efforts represent a shift in how the largest software development vendors market to their customers, said Stephen O'Grady, an analyst at RedMonk.
"For the last couple of years, pretty much every major vendor had one answer to a wide set of business challenges, particularly for people on the Java side--that answer was Java," O'Grady said. "But now they're seeing the grassroots growth of these technologies."
Threat to Java?
The growing popularity of scripting has prompted
some Java developers to ask whether Java risks being replaced by simpler alternatives.
Proponents argue that tools built around languages such as Python or Ruby are gaining in popularity because Java development is too complex for many jobs.
"What I think we're seeing in the rise of the scripting language is that Java is overkill for a lot of projects," Tom McQueeny, a software architect at a large consulting company, said in a blog posting.
Detractors claim that programs written with scripting languages could be more difficult to maintain than Java applications.
Meanwhile, some efforts are intentionally blurring the line between Java and scripting languages.
A language called Groovy is being designed specifically to run in the Java virtual machine on PCs and servers. An initial version was released in April.That close tie to Java makes Groovy a complement to, rather than a replacement for, Java, according to the technical committee in charge of Groovy, which includes representatives from Sun, IBM and the Apache Software Foundation.
"Groovy can be a low-threshold language for developers new to the Java platform as well as a productivity-enhancing tool for experienced Java developers," according to the Groovy expert group in the Java Community Process.
Though developers will continue the debate over the merits of different languages, O'Grady said traditional languages will increasingly co-exist with scripting languages as the latter become more sophisticated--and accepted.
"It comes down to different tools for different jobs," said O'Grady. "These languages, like PHP, have been doing good jobs in business situations for a while and not just because they're fast. They've proved what they need to prove."
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