Re: [igraph] Is it possible to use igraph in Java?

[Laurence Muller]

Hi Tamas,

unfortunately I do not have a lot of experience with SWIG. In our 
department we only used it for our special software and a colleague used 
it to wrap OpenSceneGraph (!).
It shouldn't be too hard to write a basic interface file and let SWIG 
take care of the rest....

Tamas Nepusz wrote:
> Hi Laurence,
>
> > A possible way to (ab)use igraph in Java would be SWIG (Simplified 
> > Wrapper and Interface Generator). SWIG connects programs written in 
> > c/c++ with many high-level programming and scripting languages. It 
> > should be able to wrap all igraph functions and structures.
> I took a quick look at SWIG - it looks quite sophisticated, but I'm 
> worried about a few things. First, it looks like it maps C functions 
> to static methods inside a special "module" class in Java, which means 
> that all igraph_* functions would become static methods of the 
> generated igraph module instead of instance methods of a generated 
> Graph class. I don't know if there's a way to tell SWIG to map 
> specific functions to instance methods of a given class instead.
> Second, every igraph function returns an error code and the actual 
> result is returned as an output argument instead. (There might even be 
> multiple output arguments for the same function; i.e., 
> igraph_isomorphic_vf2 can return a yes/no answer and a mapping between 
> the vertices of the two graphs if they are isomorphic). I'm not sure 
> how to handle this in Java. Obviously, igraph error codes should be 
> converted to exceptions and if there is only one output argument for a 
> function, then that single argument should be returned in Java as a 
> return value, but can SWIG do that automatically? If anyone in the 
> list has ever used SWIG before, I'd be interested to hear your 
> thoughts about that.


--
------------------------------------------
Laurence Muller (M.Sc.)
Informatics Institute, Faculty of Science, 
Universiteit van Amsterdam.
Science Park 107, 1098 XG Amsterdam, The Netherlands

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