Re: jdiff.sh

[Stuart Ballard]

Giannis Georgalis wrote:
>         Hello,
> I've written a small shell script that compares the methods,
> constructors and attributes (public,protected) of the Java official
> API (from the official api specification in html format) to the GNU
> classpath corespondent classes (from the source code of GCP).
>
> The script doesn't handle (yet) correctly all the thrown exceptions
> that it extracts from the html java documentation, but still the
> output is quite usefull.

Wow, that's cool!

Would you consider helping to integrate this capability into japitools 
(http://rainbow.netreach.net/~sballard/japi/)? Japitools already does 
full API comparisons but it doesn't have the capability to extract APIs 
from the documentation - instead, the "japize" tool uses the 
jode.bytecode library to identify the public members of a given set of 
packages from the binary jars or zips. But japitools does separate the 
API-inspection phase ("japize") from the compatibility-testing phase 
("japicompat") so it would be easy to offer an alternative to japize 
that worked on API documentation.

If your script could generate a ".japi.gz" file from API documentation 
without needing to look at the binaries, that would be a great feature.

I'm in the process of writing a specification for the format of japi 
files, but this isn't nearly complete enough to base an implementation 
on yet. The source code for japize is the canonical version until a spec 
is completed. The release of jdiff means I'll prioritize the spec more 
highly, so that an interoperable implementation is possible.

I've held off on announcing japitools releases publically because I'm 
hoping for further testing from a few people who are using it already; I 
don't want to make a big announcement of something that turns out to be 
broken, like a few of my recent releases have been :( (Also when I 
announced it initially, 2 years ago, nobody seemed to be particularly 
interested). Further testing of the current (0.8.6) release by other 
groups would help me to make a publically-announced 0.9 release that's 
stable, correct, and most of all, soon! :)

Stuart.

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