BeanShell BeanShell 2.0 beta 1 announcement Beanshell is cool! It brings scripting to Java. There are plenty of scripping languages for Java, however, Beanshell follows the Java syntax pretty close, so it is a good prototype and test framework language. Here is a simple example: Create a java class file called HelloWorld.java: class HelloWorld { public static void main (String [] args) { System.out.println("Hello World!"); } } Then at the command line (in Windows) do: java -cp bsh-2.0b1.jar bsh.Interpreter HelloWorld.java Now add to that same file another method, class HelloWorld { public static void speak(){ System.out.println("Hello World, from method!"); } public static void main (String [] args) { System.out.println("Hello World!"); } } And, create a new script file: // CallHelloMethod.bsh source("HelloWorld.java"); HelloWorld.speak(); Now, at the command line we get: C:\downloads\javaDownloads\BeanShell>java -cp bsh-2.0b1.jar bsh.Interpreter HelloScript.bsh Hello World, from method! Now can Ant task extensions be written in the new Beanshell directly? Good competitor to Jelly, maybe. References: Beanshell JVM Languages BSF