Will Nashorn facilitate Gradle being used for more web application assembly and test tasks, without using Node?

[Marcus Lagergren]

Startup/warmup is one of our major things that we are concentrating on for 9. Results in the lab are really already quite impressive, I am happy to say.

In the meantime, with 8u40, you can use the code caching / optimistic type caching feature to serialize code to disk. This makes consecutive invocations of a script very fast.

/M

> On 25 Dec 2014, at 17:03, KARR, DAVID <dk068x at att.com> wrote:
> 
> Gradle already mitigates the startup time problem with the Gradle Daemon, so typical client invocations will be faster than without it.
> 
> From: Benjamin Sieffert [mailto:benjamin.sieffert at metrigo.de]
> Sent: Thursday, December 25, 2014 7:44 AM
> To: KARR, DAVID
> Cc: nashorn-dev at openjdk.java.net
> Subject: Re: Will Nashorn facilitate Gradle being used for more web application assembly and test tasks, without using Node?
> 
> A problem with JVM-based components being used in a tool-like manner is the relatively huge cost associated with just starting the JVM.
> E.g. if I start a JRuby-console ("irb"), it takes 2-3 seconds, whereas a MRI console basically opens instantly. Even with the work being put into reducing
> nashorn's own warm-up time, the JVM's share will remain. An approach here seems to be to have one JVM running at all times and then relegating the
> invocations of your tools to it. Nailgun is an implementation of this recommended by the JRuby team. But such an approach certainly brings its own
> share of problems. In the end, I think that with the JIT, the JVM's very promise has always been that getting prime performance on it requires your
> application to be a bit on the longer-lasting side. Otherwise, AOT optimized code will just be plain faster. And with most commandline tools, I feel,
> invocation speed means a lot.
> 
> On 24 December 2014 at 19:02, KARR, DAVID <dk068x at att.com<mailto:dk068x at att.com>> wrote:
> Nashorn and Avatar are interesting to me, but not personally as much for the ability to write standalone or server-based JavaScript applications.
> 
> I see Node.js being primarily used in two different ways.  It is used to write those standalone and server-based JavaScript applications, but it is also used entirely in the building and testing process of web applications, primarily with the Karma, Bower, and Grunt Node modules. I imagine there are other Node modules like that that are primarily used as a tool, not as a component in a custom Node.js application.
> 
> You might consider this a "niche" application, but I'm primarily interested to see whether Nashorn will be able to make it easier to use Gradle to build web applications and run JavaScript unit tests, without involving Node.js.
> 
> 
> 
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