Re: [AD] Java wrappers (was: no subject)

[Shawn Hargreaves <shawn@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Michael D Parker <mdap71@xxxxxxxxxx> writes:
> I'm currently working on a Java interface for Allegro and Windows via the
> Java Native Interface. It could easily be ported to other allegro(and
> java)-supported platforms. Does this interest anyone or not, 

Sounds cool to me!

It would be worth talking to Peter Monks (pmonks@xxxxxxxxxx) about this, 
because he's been doing some work on wrappers for other languages using a 
package called SWIG (the Simplified Wrapper Interface Generator). I don't 
remember whether this supports Java, but in any case he knows quite a bit 
about this sort of thing.

> and if so, should it be distributed separately or as part of allegro?

Generally I think it is better for things to be kept separate, unless there 
are reasons why this absolutely isn't possible. That makes it easier for 
them to be updated independently, for example if I made a new version that 
broke your code (hopefully won't happen too often, but it might every now 
and then :-) I would just be able to upload it whenever I was ready, and 
then you could update your side of things to work with it whenever you got 
time to catch up. If the code was merged, we get stuck in a situation where 
I can't release a new version without coordinating first to make sure that 
your parts of it are still working, and you start coming under pressure to 
update things quickly in order not to hold up other people's release 
schedule.

There are times when merging does make sense, for instance with the 
multiplatform support we decided that the work of merging any new features 
into several different versions of the library outweighted the cost of 
having to coordinate having all the versions in one, but I'm not sure 
whether this applies so much to a language wrapper. I'd suggest to write it 
and release it as a separate package, and see what goes wrong: if this turns 
out to cause too many problems, we can reconsider a different approach once 
we have a better idea what sort of problems those might be.


--
Shawn Hargreaves - shawn@xxxxxxxxxx - http://www.talula.demon.co.uk/
"A binary is barely software: it's more like hardware on a floppy disk."