On Fri, 31 May 2002, Jukka Santala wrote: > I suggest yout ake a look at the jar-file index "spec" of Java, this > sounds a lot like that, so it'd be probably a good idea to look at
Since I don't think it's actually specified anywhere in any kind of detail, I'll give the basics here. The command "jar -i" indexes the target jar-file, along with any class-path entries it further specifies, and saves the index into META-INF/INDEX.LIST in the target jar-file. The format of the file looks like: JarIndex-Version: 1.0 xsmiles.jar fi fi/hut fi/hut/tml fi/hut/tml/xsmiles fi/hut/tml/xsmiles/ecma lib/xalan.jar META-INF/services javax org org/apache org/apache/xalan org/apache/xalan/client org/apache/xalan/extensions [EOF] (Not literal, ofcourse) Significantly cut the content, since that already indicates the idea. Now, "jar -i" does many questionable things; it includes paths with no classes in them (fi, fi/hut, fi/hut/tml for example are just the standard origin indicators, same for org/apache/xalan, and contain no classes). Does this help in searching through the index somehow? I doubt it. Conversely, the META-INF/services above was not auto-generated, but had to be hand-added to make Sun's JDK pick up the properties specified there. It seems apparent the jar-file index isn't used all that often presently, and it's fairly easy to generate on the run. There are caveats, ofcourse; X-Smiles for example uses an "extension mechanism" to allow dynamically adding jar-files to the classloader. Any automatic indexing should probably be capable of handling these kinds of situations as well; altough I doubt this'll cause much trouble, as it over-rides the default classloader. You might want to check it against the NetworkClassLoader in Xsmiles (originally from net.wotonomy.util) anyway. -Jukka Santala _______________________________________________ kaffe mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://kaffe.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kaffe
