Mozilla Rhino (JavaScript) is now officially bundled with Java 6 as "javax.script", making it one of the leading choices for alternate languages hosted on the Java Virtual Machine. My dev team at Google has been using Rhino as a server-side web development language for over a year, and it has proven to be a capable, mature, and surprisingly adaptable language platform. Perhaps the biggest surprise has been its excellent performance, the result of a decade of tuning and compiler optimizations by the Rhino open-source dev team. In this talk I'll give a high-level overview of life using JavaScript as a replacement for Java (specifically in the context of our Ruby on Rails port), followed by a deep dive into the Rhino runtime and byte compiler. We'll look at some of the challenges of compiling this high-level dynamic language into efficient Java bytecode.
Steve Yegge is an internationally (in)famous tech blogger with a penchant for writing about programming languages, productivity, and software culture. Steve obtained his B.S. in Computer Science from the University of Washington, and has nearly twenty years of industry experience as a programmer, program manager and software dev manager. Steve's programming career spans such diverse domains as embedded operating systems, large-scale multiplayer game design, massively scalable e-commerce systems (at Amazon.com), web development, handheld device applications and software productivity tools. Today Steve is happily employed at Google as a Senior Software Engineer in the Kirkland/Seattle office.