[jwinter]

Check out nailgun if you're interested in using the JVM as a command-line tool without a cold-start.

http://martiansoftware.com/nailgun/index.html

[dschobel]

I was looking at this the other day and am concerned that it hasn't been updated since February, 2005. That's practically ancient in terms of software.

[jwinter]

This looks unofficial, but Github has a version that has updates over the past few years:

http://github.com/ato/nailgun/tree/master/nailgun/

[zaphar]

and yet it functions perfectly with no problems when I use it in the VimClojure plugin. Tex hasn't been "updated" in ages either yet its fully functional. Sometimes software is just done and no further activity is needed. Judge it on whether it works not the date of the last commit.

[dschobel]

Well as the github repo posted above you attests, there are (unsurprisingly) some non-trivial bugs in the last official release.

Unmaintained code is just not something I would ever use in a production capacity/rely on for my daily work. Especially considering the changes which have come to java and the jvm since 2005.