Thursday, May 3, 2007

JVM Tunneling

I've blogged on this idea in the past, but didn't have a term for the thought.

Define JVM Tunneling to be the phenomenon where certain languages, by running on the JVM, encounter ultra-low resistance as a proposed addition to a project or organization. The most successful JVM tunnelers are languages that compile to bytecodes and whose installations require the addition of a single jar to the classpath.

Primary examples are Groovy and JRuby.

3 comments:

Charles Oliver Nutter said...

I like it. It's insidious.

Anonymous said...

I thought JRuby was not compiled by now.

andyf said...

Heh, you make it sound like a bad thing :)

I like to think of this kind of strategy as Foot In The Door. Or perhaps, First Step Towards Glorious New Regime.