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 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 runtime 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. Because 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.