Summary

The Formiga Scripting Language - for short Formiga - is a programming language similar to and based in Ant 1.1 but has evolved to become a scripting language that can be used by any application that can setup a context environment written in Java and communicate with it.

Like Ant Formiga is written in Java and needs a JVM version 1.4 or higher.

The Ant Projects are called Formlets in Formiga. A Formlet like a Project can be used as a procedure to execute system, application or user defined tasks but they also can be used to generate an output stream that can be, for instance, an XML or HTML document. To allow this, Formiga provides mechanisms to mix tasks and elements not understandable by Formiga in the same Formlet document. It also allows to transform, using a XSLT processor, the whole or a part of the generated XML document.

Formiga embeds Apache's Tomcat or can attach to a running Servlet Container to setup and run a servlet that executes Formlets, the output stream generated by these Formlets becomes the servlet output stream.

An application that wants to use Formiga as a scripting language should extend a context class, and implement some methods to allow the Formlets to access the application resources and to react to application changes. It normally will write some specific tasks to perform application related behavior.

Formiga defines a simple expression language that can be used in Formlets text elements or attribute values. The language uses properties, variables - defined by the client application - and functions. This language can be extended by every task, and by the client application by defining their own functions.

Formiga supports event driven and scheduled Formlets. An application, using standard interfaces, can parse a conditional expression at the beginning of the Formlet and setup subscriptions to start the execution of a Formlet when some application event occurs.

Formiga provides standard flow control tasks: if-then-else, do, loop, try-catch, etc. as well.

Download

Formiga can be downloaded from SourceForge here. The project is located in http://formiga.sourceforge.net.

License

Formiga is licensed under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License and is therefore an OSI Certified Open Source Software.