You'll find the uDig groovy console (or should I call it Jesse's console, as I think it's his private contrib project) also has shortcut methods like yours: maps, layers, features, etc.
I'm biased towards groovy, but for no special reason (except that's related to Java and that's, er..., trendy or groovy, and that I had decided to learn it).
I fell in love with Ruby because of it's differences to Java. I see them as a positive :-)
JUMP had a BeanShell console that I found very useful for trying things out, doing small data manipulation and sending to colleagues for them to use.
I see no reason a groovy console should be preferred. Perhaps it's best to agree on a uDig/Console Category to allow all those consoles (jython developers out there?) to be brought into the GUI through the same View menu.
I think we need a technical discussion to see what are the differences between the various approachs, Jesse's groovy console, JGrass's console and my JRuby console. I expect JGrass is the most mature here (certainly sounds like it from Andreas description). Ideally we could have a way of making them more similar, so that a user could, for example, pick their preferred scripting language and API definition startup scripts (with some defaults preset for uDIG). In this scenario it might be that plan uDIG, JGrass and my AWE project are simply differently configured versions of the same base scripting platform, instead of being entirely different scripting setups.
Cheers, Craig
