Sorry for the very long delay in responding. I've been out on a rather long
vacation.
I share your disappointment. I have put off too long looking for someone to
take over ownership of javax.usb. I have asked my (IBM) manager to help me
find someone in IBM to take over, that hopefully can restart development and
try to move javax.usb closer to providing true cross platform operation.
Unfortunately my current job role doesn't involve development in javax.usb
(just maintenence).
In the meantime, please do send any updates to the mailing list and I will
absolutely be happy to add them to the CVS code (with proper code review of
course).
I (and all the others on the mailing list, I'm sure) are happy to answer any
questions as well.
On Wed, Aug 12, 2009 at 10:10 AM, Kustaa Nyholm
<kustaa.nyh...@planmeca.com>wrote:
> Hi,
>
> been lurking on this list for a few years now, I believe.
>
> Just spent a frustrating few hours in the list archives and
> googling the net to decide what to do.
>
> I'm about to write some code that will need to access
> a USB HID device. I mainly work on Mac and it seems
> that this will not be a big undertaking no matter how I
> do it. I can do it in C with the Mac OS IOKit but since
> essentially what I'm doing is not in anyway Mac specific
> it would make sense to write it to a cross platform USB API.
> And since Java is cross platform and I prefer to work
> with Java anyway, a Java USB API is what I would like to have.
> This is the very reason I've been lurking this list.
>
> My today's research produced pretty much similiar results as
> the once I've conducted in the past one or two years:
>
> there is no working cross platform USB API, not for C, not for Java,
> at least not one that has a future. A cross platform C API
> would be fine as it would be trivial to access that using JNA
> or JNI.
>
> Here is my summary of the situation:
>
> Project: jUSB
> Language: Java
> Status: Dead, last commits from 2002
> Supports: Linux
>
> Project: libusb 0.1
> Language: C
> Supports: Linux, MacOS X, Windows(libusb-win32 project)
> Status: complete, but no development in sight
> Notes: no isochronous endpoint / asynchronous I/O
>
> Project: libusb 1.0
> Language: C
> Supports: Linux
> Status: complete, developed activly?
> Notes: API not compatible with 0.1, but a wrapper exist
>
> Project: OpenUSB
> Language: C
> Supports: Linux/BSD/Darwin (Mac OS X?) no Windows
> Status: Recent development
> Notes: Very little info, backed by SUN?
>
> Project: jsr80 / javax.usb
> Language: Java
> Supports: Linux
> Status: progressing slooowly for years
> Notes: The official USB API, some promise of Windows port
>
> Project: libusb4j
> Language: Java
> Supports: what ever libusb supports
> Notes: uses libusb 0.1 API so at the moment a sort of dead end
>
> Now why I'm writing on this mailing list? Since this javax.usb
> is *the* official USB API this seems the most logical place to
> discuss this. No point discussing this an a dead project's
> mailing list and OpenUSB does not even have one!
>
> The purpose of all this rant? I'm going to put in some serious
> hours to implement what I need. As consequence I'm going
> to learn (or fail!) how to 'do' USB on Mac and hence I
> might as well contribute something to the Java USB API
> project, but I would not like to back the wrong horse.
> So I would like to contribute to a project that has a future
> ie will become the dominant standard and that will
> contribute something back to me (I'm not keen on
> writing Linux/Windows support but I would like to have them).
>
> But at the moment I do not know which horse to back.
>
> I'm instinctively drawn to jsr80/javax.usb since it
> is the 'official' API but I've been badly disappointed
> *over the years* at the slow pace anything but Linux port.
>
> Like I said, I could maybe contribute (parts of) a Mac port but
> I would like to see a Windows port too.
>
> libusb 0.1 seems to be the best API at the moment
> for me since it works for the major three platforms
> that I'm interested in but it looks like a dead end
> and investing on it seem wrong.
>
> OpenUSB shows some promise but not much info
> is available on it. Some claim it is backed by Sun!
>
> It makes my head spin to think how many *different*
> efforts there have been to implement across platforms
> something that JSR80 specifies in little more
> than a dozen pages. What a waste. I guess cross platform is in
> nobody's interest, everyone is just interested in *their* platform.
>
>
> br Kusti
>
>
>
>
>
>
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