Hey All. This is probably worthy of a blog post, but I thought I would ask here.
In posse podcasts, the dearth of 3rd party libs written in non java JVM languages is often brought up (ie jars that you use as dependencies of your project, or that are transitive dependencies of something you use). I could be wrong, but I don't know of any libraries at all myself in common use. So is this a case of time and maturity? Speaking for myself, I have written utilities in scala for my own usage, potentially will find other usages (always tends to, over time). The issue myself, and others face, is how to expose/export an appropriate interface. Each JVM language has its own way of defining a "java interface" - in scala it is as simple as using traits and not using crazy names, and using the standard types. However, this still isn't quite right, scala doc is not the same as javadoc, and can't be mixed directly with it (that I know). This was a showstopped for a colleague who wanted a nice first class java interfaces for people to use. My solution is to create a set of java interfaces, in its own module, document it - and have that as the public face (with implementations in appropriate languages). I guess that is making java interfaces as the "IDL" of the JVM (which is not such a bad thing - Interfaces in java are one of the nicer things that I think they got right). So this means that to consume a JVM lib, in non java, you have a jar + javadocs which smell familiar, but you also have the language runtime lib as a dependency as well (a notable exception is duby - which compiles only to classes, no deps needed). Thoughts ? Experiences? -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "The Java Posse" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/javaposse?hl=en.
