We break away briefly from the TF-IDF thread to explore the polyglot capabilities of Storm. Polyglot development is becoming increasingly important, particularly in the open source world where mashups present a rapid path to delivery, regardless of the underlying technology. There is an increasing number of JVM-based languages that maintain binary-level compatibility with Java, such as Scala. In these cases, the Polyglot project is simply a composition of JAR files with appropriate levels of modularity. In the cases where the underlying execution environment isn't common, other approaches are required. There are many use cases, over and above convenient re-use, such as high-performance computing, where native implementations provide for greater levels of optimization or leverage of low-level hardware capabilities, such as the rich functionality of GPUs, in most modern PCs.

There are many approaches to integrating systems developed in incompatible languages, including messaging...