Concerns with the Dynamic Language Runtime

the Dynamic Language Runtime is an Open-sourced library developed by Microsoft to bring support for scripting languages on top of the .NET Framework. The code currently live in the IronPython codebase, and it is used by IronPython, the upcoming IronRuby (the Microsoft .NET implementation of Ruby, and it is planned for the upcoming releases of JScript and VB.NET. The first release is announced late 2008.

I browsed the code shipped in the IronRuby repository and I have two concerns about this code:

• Currently there are some hard links in the code to IronPython, IronRuby, and JScript. I think these should be deleted in favor of a more generic approach, to allow any scripting language implementation to take advantage of the DLR.


• There are compilation directives looking for Silverlight everywhere in the code, which I consider shameful, because what is achieved by compiling against Silverlight is not clear. Also having to use two very different runtimes, one for a regular .NET application, and another for Silverlight, is not very good IMHO. It reminds me of the old times of C pragma hell... Also what are the constrainsts for the hosting scripting language implementation ? As Silverlight is not open-sourced or standardized, what will become of the DLR API when Silverlight will change, a thing which will surely happen ?

Of course, the DLR is still under development, and things will evolve and maybe change in the course of time. But it reminds me of the old Microsoft attitude: propose new tools and libraries, with heavy advertising, declare them as open for everyone, and then tweak them heavily for working with Microsoft implementations only (I don't think that this is a conscious attitude)... This is not a problem for now, but it could become one after the first "official" release, when people will start to use it in their own scripting languages.

Have fun with ARINC 661, XUL, Javascript, beanshell, and Java

One of my project is a Client-Server ARINC 661 framework which use a lot of socket-bound activity from the Client (called User Application in the standard, it handles the logic here) to the Server (which perform the graphic rendering).

The communication protocol in ARINC 661 is specific and a bit complex (no SOAP, no REST, no CORBA, not RMI, but purely specific binary messages on top of the lower-level bus-level layer protocol). So to ease development of Java clients, I developed a generic API to handle this.

I thought it could be cool to allow users to prototype the logic of the Client. Using beanshell for this was the logic thing to do (pardon the pun), because it is very close to Java, so transcoding from beanshell to Java is straigthforward.

The second step was to be able to add scripted control panels for the Client. I don't want to recreate the wheel, so I decided for the use of XUL. One cool side-effect is that users would be able to debug their scripts using Firefox.

OK, it's one thing to create control panels in Java by parsing XUL scripts, but if you are not able to wire the widgets commands to the logic, it's no use. I decided for using Javascript (by using Rhino). Then I had to wire beanshell methods to Javascript. It involved a bit of code to be able to do that, but it was possible.

But getting or setting widget attributes at the Javascript level is also mandatory ! With some amount of work (in fact not a lot of work, I only had to use the right approach to do it), it was also possible.

So basically now I have a framework where I can script ARINC 661 logic in beanshell, and wire these scripts to commands in XUL declarative files. I have a purely scripted ARINC 661 Client.

In this process, I found that Rhino is really a very good Javascript engine, but that there is few informations or tutorials when you have to perform specific things like I had to do (hmm, it's no so specific). I will blog about what I discovered about Rhino specificities in some days (there's not much to say about beanshell / Java, it just work, but as it is so close to Java, there's no surprise). I thing it can be useful to others.