Greetings everyone, I'm writing because a coworker pointed out this group when I mentioned I'd developed a new Java collection. I tried finding an e-mail of someone to contact on the Jakarta pages, but none was to be found and I got no response when I e-mailed [EMAIL PROTECTED] (which on the website seemed to be billed as the developers list), but after subscribing to dev I finally got this e-mail address - hopefully the right one!
I've read a few of the archived e-mails, read some of the new ones, and gone through the web pages and haven't seen references to collections like the one I've worked out - so... My MultiSorterDumper (name open for discussion) collection requires an object to implement the MultiSortable interface. That interface consists of one method to get the number of sortable fields and one method that returns an array of objects - which determine how it's to be sorted on each index. The MSD currently uses TreeMaps for each index as well as a Vector to keep track of the order each was added. An MSD can return Iterators on any index and could, but doesn't yet, return submaps for index-specific queries. It will be able to execute multi-index queries which shouldn't be a problem considering the functionality of TreeMaps. I'm glad to see that this Jakarta package has some multithreaded-safe collections, and I plan on upgrading to them soon. Other ideas on making it thread-safe are appreciated. I'm finding, though, that Java's limited ability to deal with programming meta-data and inability to define a class-level variable in an interface to be detrimental factors. It works as well as it needs to for my development effort and will continue to evolve as needed, but it doesn't work nearly as implicitly/integrated(ly?) as I would have liked. I'd like to contribute it both if it's a useful addition to this group and to get more ideas about further development and optimization for it. Questions: 1. Is this something of interest to this group? 2. If so, how should I continue and/or contribute it? 3. Are there ideas on how to improve this multi-indexed collection? (it's not strictly a collection yet - I haven't implemented all methods) 4. If I do contribute it (the implementation - my idea already has be contributed, hasn't it? ;), what does that mean exactly - for the code, for me, for the Commons subproject, etc.? 5. If it has to be made more generalized to be a proper Collection, currently the MultiSorterDumper works only as a Vector - suggestions for improvement would be appreciated. Thanks, -Chris -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> For additional commands, e-mail: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
