Re: Constant Field Values

[Stuart Ballard]

Eric Blake wrote:
> 
> I've already been doing some of that in the packages I've touched.  Sun
> still hasn't published ALL their constants, but it is a nice start.
> Their doclet fails to list the values for several interfaces, so you
> will still have to write small programs to display some values (like I
> had to do for java.awt.Transparency.OPAQUE, for example).  But I think
> if you have already signed the FSF papers, then go for it.

This is one thing that can be done with japicompat
(http://stuart.wuffies.net/japi/). I personally think that this is a
very useful tool for classpath, although I'm biased since I wrote it ;)
It has languished quite a lot - I became discouraged since the data
structures and algorithms it uses take a pretty huge amount of memory
when trying to parse JDK versions higher than 1.1. But probably some
perl wizard could figure out a way to fix that...

I just went through and updated the documentation to the best of my
memory (since it was outdated already by the time I got discouraged). If
anyone is interested in taking over maintenance of these tools, I'd be
happy to hand them over. The code, if I remember rightly, is pretty well
commented, so even if a complete rewrite *is* needed to get memory usage
down, there should be a comprehensible code base to start with.

One workaround to the excessive memory usage would be just to operate on
subsets of the API at a time: for example, instead of just doing "+java
-java.awt.peer -java.text.resources" you could do "+java.util" to limit
yourself to the subset of the API that lives under java.util. Also,
.japi files are concatenatable so the full jdk14.japi can be generated
by concatenating the output of multiple Japize runs, and then a suitable
grep pattern can cut it into smaller chunks for japicompatting. This
might make it useful "right now", without having to do a rewrite to get
the memory usage down.

[If anyone has any suggestions of things I ought to do in looking for a
new maintainer, other than making postings like this when the topic
comes up, please reply off-list]

Stuart.

-- 
Stuart Ballard, Programmer
NetReach - Internet Solutions
(215) 283-2300, ext. 126
http://www.netreach.com/