Jactl is a powerful scripting language for the JVM platform whose syntax is a combination of bits from Java, Groovy, and Perl. It was written to be integrated into Java applications to provide a secure locked-down, way for customers/users to be able to customise the application behaviour.

It is especially suited to event-loop/reactive applications due to its built-in suspend/resume mechanism based on continuations that ensures it never blocks the execution thread on which it is running.

It provides a way for the execution state of scripts to be checkpointed and persisted or distributed over a network to allow scripts to be recovered and resumed after a failure.

Why?

I wrote Jactl because I wanted a scripting language that Java applications could embed to allow their users to provide customisations and extensions that had the following characteristics:

  • Tightly Controlled

    I wanted the application developer to be able to control what the users could and couldn’t do in the scripting language. I didn’t want to use an existing language where there was no way to prevent users from accessing files, networks, databases, etc. that they should be touching or spawning threads or other processes.

  • Familiar Syntax

    I wanted a language that had a syntax similar to Java for ease of adoption.

  • Non Blocking

    I wanted script writers to be able to perform blocking operations where the script needs to wait for something (such as invoking a function that accesses the database, or performs a remote request to another server) but which doesn’t block the thread of execution. I wanted to have the script code suspend itself and be able to be resumed once the long-running operation completed. This allows the scripting language to be used in event-loop/reactive applications where you are never allowed to block the event-loop threads.

  • Hidden Asynchronous Behaviour

    While not wanting scripts to block, I also did not want the script writers to have to be aware, when invoking a function, whether the function was asynchronous or not. I wanted a language that looked completely synchronous but which, under the covers, took care of all the asynchronous behaviour.

  • Checkpointing

    Ability for script execution state to be checkpointed where necessary and for this state to be able to be persisted or replicated so that scripts can be restored and resumed from where they were up to when a failure occurs.

The final motivation for writing a new language compiler was that I was looking for something fun to work on and at some point I had stumbled across a marvellous book called Crafting Interpreters by Robert Nystrom and this inspired me to want to write my own compiler. I highly recommend the book: as well as being a good introduction to compiler design, it is also a fun read.

Who is it for?

It is intended to be used in any Java based application where the application developer wants to provide customisation capabilities to their users.

It could just be used as a mechanism for reading in a configuration file. For example, the Jactl commandline scripts and REPL assume a .jactlrc configuration file which contains Jactl code that is read and executed at startup to set the values of some properties in a Map.

Other uses would be to provide a customisation mechanism for:

  • Game Engines
  • Database Engine extensions
  • Real-time Applications
  • Backend customisations for complex multi-tenant web applications

  • FaaS (Function as a Service)

    Scripts could act as functions and their secure nature means that many functions can be served from the same process to avoid having to spin up instances or processes for each function

Getting Started

To get a feel for how the language looks and the type of language features that Jactl offers see the Language Features page.

You can download the Jactl library and find the source code for Jactl at GitHub: jactl

To start playing with Jactl and for testing out code interactively, you can use the Read-Evaluate-Print-Loop (REPL) utility.

To see how to use Jactl from the command line see the page about command line scripts.

To learn how to integrate Jactl into your application see the Integration Guide.

To integrate Jactl into a Vert.x based application have a look at the jactl-vertx library.

To learn more about the language itself read the Language Guide.


James Crawford   April 2023