Posted by Erik Klein, Product Manager, SuiteCloud Platform
What on earth is Graal? Hint, it’s not a videogame character or specialized woodworking tool. It’s a modern runtime solution from Oracle Labs, and it’s incredibly flexible. Imagine a single virtual machine that supports multiple languages like Java, Node.js, JavaScript and even C++ with significantly improved efficiency, isolation and security. Simply put, Graal stands at the forefront of enterprise-class application development as a common runtime environment supporting the industry’s most powerful development languages.
But it gets even better. Certain Graal operations have been clocked up to three times faster. And, applications may consume as little as five times less memory than traditional VMs. For example, services have been measured in specific environments (such as within server-less infrastructure) to start 100 times faster.
When we first looked at Graal, it quickly became apparent that the technology offered a lot of potential, both as a technique to advance NetSuite’s Cloud architecture as well as evolve the SuiteScript API. It did not disappoint. Because Graal is built cloud-native from the ground up, the technology was surprisingly easy to integrate into NetSuite’s prototype cloud. Going from research to beta and then production in NetSuite 2019 Release 2 took a small team less than a year. It has been rock solid since going live.
Under the hood, Graal is transforming NetSuite’s JavaScript infrastructure. While the polyglot VM functions as a runtime for Scala to Ruby and R, NetSuite currently deploys GraalJS, a high-performance implementation that supports the latest versions of ECMAScript. This means that any customer or partner developing in SuiteScript 2.1 has access to the full range of modern JavaScript language features and advanced syntax options out of the box.
To sum it up, NetSuite Platform developers can realize improved productivity by leveraging ECMAScript and SuiteScript 2.1 capabilities powered by Graal technology in the NetSuite Cloud. Here are a few links to learn more, and visit Answer Id: 87298 in SuiteAnswers for more information about ECMAScript support in SuiteScript 2.1.