I am planning to buy a Chromebook for academic purposes however I cannot seem to find a concrete answer for my question: Is it possible to execute Java programs, Groovy Scripts, etc on a Chromebook ?
A quick search on Google and I get all sorts of contradictory answers. Please help me with this.
The short answer is that out of the box you can't execute Java because in ChromeOS you basically don't have Java installed. It's chrome (the browser) with a little extra APIs that let it act as an OS. However, if you like to hack... you can install ubuntu (or other linux distros) on it and from there you have the ability to execute Java (and many other technologies). Here is a tutorial I've wrote in the past on 'how to install ubuntu on your Chromebook'. Good luck.
It is not possible to execute them directly in ChromeOS, but a good alternative is often using online development environments or sshing to a machine that can run the full environment. Leaving your chromebook with little to do and a very snappy performance experience
