The session looks at the fundamentals of Scala with examples to highlight its unique features like case classes and pattern matching, for comprehensions, traits, functions as values and others. It also looks at Scala’s support for writing internal as well as external DSLs.

Spring’s support for scripting languages allows you to extend your Java applications with beans defined in a scripting language, such as Groovy. Spring container transparently instantiates, configure and dependency injects the beans across these supported languages. Beans defined in a scripting language like Groovy come with some handy advantages such as ability to “refresh” the already loaded Groovy classes when the underlying source files change.

The concept of non-Java languages on the Java Virtual Machine is not new. The JVM has played host to several ported languages such as Ruby (JRuby), Python (Jython) and even Javascript (Rhino) along with languages designed primarily for the JVM like Scala and Groovy. Clojure (pronounced like closure) is a general purpose programming language, hosted primarily on the JVM.

Python scripting language use has increased by 45% since Spring 2008 according the an Evans Data North American Development Survey. Only 13% of developers used Python before Google announced its App Engine platform in Spring 2008, which at the time only supported Python, but that number has increased to 20.3% today. Other scripting language use remained relatively constant, with only small gains or losses in popularity among languages such as Ruby, PHP, Perl and Actionscript.

Noop is a new language that attempts to blend the best lessons of languages old and new, while syntactically encouraging industry best-practices and discouraging the worst offenses. Noop is initially targeted to run on the Java Virtual Machine, is what the Noop site says.

JRuby guys leave Sun, citing the uncertainty surrounding Sun’s acquisition by Oracle and Oracle’s support for the JRuby language.