Don Schwarz - 2003-09-05

BSFPerl requires code written in both Java and Perl.  I considered packaging these components separately (a jar built from ant, and a set of perl modules installed from CPAN).

I decided against this for the following reasons:
  a) didn't want to require any changes to a Perl installation,
  b) potential synchronization problems across releases,
  c) Java code may be loaded from class files, jar's, or in more obscure ways (e.g., applets).  Having the Java code write out the Perl code seemed like it would impose the least limitations on this.

However if I was to distribute it as a separate set of modules, Perl coders would be able to easily test their scripts outside of BSF (ala the CGI module's terminal mode).

So, right now BSFPerl will essentially write out a single Perl script to java.io.tmpdir each time that it is used.  This file is removed when the VM exits.

This probably will not work for applets.  In theory, there's no reason we need to even write out a file.  We could stream the Perl script into the interpreter each time, but that would make debugging more difficult and feels inefficient (though I suspect it would not be).

Any thoughts?  Are there other options?