Re: Attention GCJ devel team

[Stuart Ballard]

> > James> Effectively this tool can generate class stubs (and
> > James> automatically implement setters and getters, assign final
> > James> variable values (using reflection) for the entire J2SE api in
> > James> about 20 minutes.  As near as I can tell this tool does not
> > James> violate the SUN license (that I accepted when downloading the
> > James> spec) because effectively the software does exactly what people
> > James> would do were they implementing a clean room version of the
> > James> api.

Can I take this opportunity to plug japitools
<http://stuart.wuffies.net/japi>? It doesn't generate stubs, but it does
tell you when you're missing required member variables or methods, and
it also points out things like incorrect thrown exceptions, incorrect
superclasses, and basically anything that might violate binary
compatibility. A japi2java program would be absolutely trivial to write,
and I've almost done so a couple of times just "because I can".

Last time I updated the website I hadn't touched it in 2 years and
thought that it would probably benefit from a new maintainer, but in
fact just making that update caused me to be more motivated and I've
been working on an updated version on my laptop for the past couple of
weeks. The new version should eliminate the memory-usage problems and
make it possible to operate on very large APIs (like JDK1.2 and up)
without needing to have a supercomputer to do it.

It'll also add the capability to ask for all errors against JDK1.1 that
*don't* also occur with JDK1.2 - so we can test our compatibility with
1.1 without getting a whole bunch of false positives for the cases we're
already up to 1.2 compatibility (and where 1.2 wasn't backward
compatible with 1.1 - which is in quite a few places, as japitools will
happily point out for you).

The one thing to beware with your approach is that if you include
javadoc comments you are definitely violating copyright, because the
content of the comments is copyrighted. I don't think that you are doing
that, but if you are, well, you need to stop.

Stuart.

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