Switching from Rhino to Nashorn
I have a Java 7 project which makes a lot of use of Javascript for scripting various features. Until now I was using Rhino as script engine. I would now like to move to Java 8, which also means that I will replace Rhino by Nashorn.
How compatible is Nashorn to Rhino? Can I use it as a drop-in replacement, or can I expect that some of my scripts will not work anymore and will need to be ported to the new engine? Are there any commonly-used features of Rhino which are not supported by Nashorn?
Answer
One problem is that Nashorn can no longer by default import whole Java packages into the global scope by using importPackage(com.organization.project.package);
There is, however, a simple workaround: By adding this line to your script, you can enable the old behavior of Rhino:
load("nashorn:mozilla_compat.js");
Another problem I ran into is that certain type-conversions when passing data between java and javascript work differently. For example, the object which arrives when you pass a Javascript array to Java can no longer be cast to List, but it can be cast to a Map<String, Object>. As a workaround you can convert the Javascript array to a Java List in the Javascript code using Java.to(array, Java.type("java.util.List"))