Current state of BeanShell

Question

We are investigating possibility of using BeanShell to write scripts that do a lot of file operations. Currently bash scripts are used.

Now the main question is - is BeanShell stable at this moment? I know that it is not actively supported , but does that matter? Are there bugs? What about BeanShell2? Is it original plus some bug-fixes? Or are there other changes?

I am also wondering if at this point in time using Groovy is better given that it is actively supported and developed by Pivotal.

Any additional information regarding pros and cons of either Bash scripts, BeanShell and Groovy scripts is greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

Adding to @hsib answer, There's a new 2.0b6 version:

2016-02-18 Security update

Note: A security vulnerability has been identified in BeanShell that could be exploited for remote code execution in applications that has BeanShell on its classpath (CVE-2016-2510). The vulnerability has been fixed in the security update BeanShell 2.0b6.

Answer 2

You really haven't given us much to go on here. No specifics about your environment, not much in the way of criteria. Nothing really about the problems that you are trying to solve with scripting. You are clearly thinking about moving away from bash for some reason, but you haven't really told us why.

If you are comfortable with bash, then I agree with @Nick Ellis. Stick with it.

However, if for some reason you are determined to choose either Groovy or Beanshell, the choice is pretty clear. Groovy is a well-supported language whose user base and application base are both growing by leaps and bounds. Beanshell... not so much.

Answer 3

I searched around to understand the current situation a few months ago and here are my findings.

1. Original release from http://www.beanshell.org hasn't been updated since 2.0b4
2. In maven repository, last release from benshell.org is 2.0b5 on Jun, 2005.
3. In 2011, beanshell2 was forked. Last release was v2.1.8 on Feb 20,2014. This fork is never released to maven repo.
4. In 2012, there was a discussion on apache commons-dev to adopt beanshell.
5. In 2013, it was reminded that it was not voted on incubator list.
6. Shortly after, it was proposed and voted on incubator-general.
7. But then, it was followed by a discussion that it should be put into sandbox.
8. In 2015, beanshell2 was cloned to github from google code.
9. Also on 2015-09-23, apache-extras repository was moved from google code to https://github.com/beanshell/beanshell/. (I missed the creation of original repository)

Answer 4

I would stick with bash. Even if one of these scripting languages is better in the sense that it has features you want, is easier to use, or has more support, you still need to switch from bash to this other language. Furthermore bash is drastically more common and well known, which means it is easier to find people who know it and find solutions on line. Without a very strong reason, such as a feature you need that bash doesn't provide, it seems like making the switch would be a lot of trouble without gaining much ground.