Re: [Clirr-devel] Initial questions

[<lak...@t-...>]

Simon Kitching wrote:

>Hi,
>
>Can someone let me know the answers to the following?
>
>* 
>What Java version is clirr required to be compatible with?
>eg are java1.4-specific features allowed in the clirr codebase?
>
>I'm particularly thinking about XSL-related features. I would like to
>generate reports using xslt. Java 1.4 introduced the first built-in
>support for xslt. Can this support be assumed to be present or not?
>
>  
>

Personally I'm OK with 1.4 if it , at work I don't use 1.3 anymore. 
However for our potential target projects like jakarta commons, log4j, 
etc. I'm not really sure. I think their libraries are designed to work 
with 1.3, but I don't know about their build process - is it required 
that every build target (like "run-clirr") in jakarta commons will work 
with Java 1.3?

For your particular question, XSLT support can be added to Java 1.3 
simply by adding some libaries to the classpath. I suppose it's easy to 
add support for 1.3 later if required - go ahead and assume 1.4 for now.

>*
>I would like to add a class to allow clirr to be run from the
>command-line. Is this ok? And is it ok to add a dependency on
>jakarta-commons-cli for this purpose?
>
>  
>

Vincent and I were discussing different integration frontends for clirr 
recently (Ant, Maven, Eclipse) and command line is just another one. 
Yes, a command line interface is most welcome. Please put it in it's own 
package, just like the Ant task has it's own package.

Does jakarta-commons-cli have additional dependencies (like 
commons-logging, commons-lang, etc.)? If not, I'm OK with using commons-cli.

>*
>I had trouble compiling the code initially due to the non-ascii
>"u-umlaut" character in the name "Lars Kuhne". In the ant buildfile I
>had to add "encoding='ISO-8859-1'" in order to compile.[NB: I created an
>ant buildfile by hand as I had problems with Maven].
>
>  
>

The build.xml file is created automatically during the release build, 
it's not maintained by hand. Vincent is a Maven comitter, I assume we 
can resolve any problems with Maven quite easily. You should really be 
able to do a CVS checkout and type "cd clirr; maven jar". What exactly 
were your problems?

>Is there any chance this could be converted to an ascii "u"? (yes, I
>realise it would technically be a mis-spelling).
>
>  
>

What are the values of your $LANG environment variable and your 
file.encoding Java system property? Some Linux distributions do have 
some pretty weird defaults...

If our build tools have a problem with non-ascii characters, my 
preference is to fix the build tools. Most other countries in Europe use 
special characters as well (France, Spain, Scandinavia), so this should 
really work reliably.

However, to get you up to speed we can temporarily change "ü" to "ue" 
(the correct transformation in case umlauts are not available) until the 
problem in Maven/Ant is fixed. Exactly which occurence would you like to 
change?

Lars