WiSchrSem

One trend in software engineering that has gained great momentum in the last few years is the amplification in the use of scripting languages: Through the success of the web and the growing power and sinking prices of hardware these languages that were only used for limited tasks like configuration or automation in the past are now more and more used to build whole applications on an enterprise level. This trend is now backed and enforced by the port of existing languages to and the implementation of new script languages on the two leading runtime environments, .NET and JRE. The question under which circumstances switching from a well-established language like Java is the right choice is discussed in many ways. Surprisingly the main factor why scripting languages weren't used as application languages on their own right for a long time has been neglected so far: These languages perform not as well as f. ex. Java. So the purpose of this paper will be a performance comparison between a popular and maybe in near future dominating script language implementation, Groovy, and the Sun reference implementation of the Java Programming Language in order to see how they perform in comparison with each other.