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.