Sam Ruby wrote:
That's an excellent idea. An interface encapsulating "compile this" would be great. Especially if we could have a flag for in-process vs. fork, and the ability to pass an InputStream even to compilers that insist on compiling from the file system (the library would deal with temporary files in a compiler-dependent and platform-friendly way), and the ability to get the class file as an OutputStream...Craig R. McClanahan wrote:
Would there be a value in a commons-javac? Several Apache projects seem to have need for this function...
That would be an interesting approach, but also a non-trivial amount of work. Any compiler hackers out there?
I guess I wasn't clear.
It seems that more than one Apache project has a need to wrapper java compilers (classic, modern, jikes). It also seems that the amount of logic for dealing with the ideosyncracies with the various releases (1.2 only has classic, 1.3 has both, 1.4 may only have modern) continues to grow, particularly if now a classloader is recommended...
Perhaps we could come up with a single set of common code which can be used by multiple projects?
While we're on the topic of new projects, I've been thinking about writing a Java Gestalt object. Basically it would implement a hell of a lot of "has" methods, like "hasJava2Collections()" or "hasRMI()", in a way that's easier to code to than catching ClassNotFound exceptions... It would make it somewhat easier to write code that runs on multiple VMs. Would anyone else find this interesting?
- A
