How can I obtain an interactive shell (like Ruby's irb) for Java?

Question

I spent the last year doing Ruby development, and during that time I discovered irb, which makes running little "code experiments" easy and fun. I've recently switched teams and am now doing Java development, and I've found that I really miss my irb window. I would like to do the same thing for Java, but I don't know how.

I'm using Eclipse (groan), but Eclipse's bells and whistles are not the same thing.

Answer 1

BeanShell is probably what you're looking for.

https://github.com/beanshell/beanshell

Answer 2

There are a few choices: BeanShell has been around for a long time, and is a great Java REPL.

Another alternative is groovy's groovysh or groovyConsole. While groovy isn't Java in the strict sense, it's great for interactively playing around with Java classes.