BeanShell is a small, free, embeddable, Java source interpreter with
object scripting language features, written in Java. BeanShell
executes standard Java statements and expressions, in addition to
obvious scripting commands and syntax. BeanShell supports scripted
objects as simple method closures like those in Perl and
JavaScript(tm). You can use BeanShell interactively for Java
experimentation and debugging or as a simple scripting engine for your
applications. In short: BeanShell is a dynamically interpreted Java,
plus some useful stuff. Another way to describe it is to say that in
many ways BeanShell is to Java as Tcl/Tk is to C: BeanShell is
embeddable - You can call BeanShell from your Java applications to
execute Java code dynamically at run-time or to provide scripting
extensibility for your applications. Alternatively, you can call your
Java applications and objects from BeanShell; working with Java
objects and APIs dynamically. Since BeanShell is written in Java and
runs in the same space as your application, you can freely pass
references to "real live" objects into scripts and return them as
results.
