Re: [java-gnome-hackers] a possible merge strategy

[Colin W. <wa...@ve...>]

On Wed, Oct 15, 2008 at 10:04 AM, Stefan Prelle <st...@pr...> wrote:

> You have a point when saying that providing an API by means of
> auto-generation is faster than hand-writing them.

It's not just that it's faster - there are other arguments as well.
For example, if one isn't an expert in the library domain, one could
easily break the library.  To pick a recent example, trying to change
some of the GTK+ double arguments to integers.

Even if one was an expert in all areas of GTK+ (and GTK+ is
*enormous*) - how much would such a binding author in general know
about web browsers (WebKit), or universal plug and play (GUPNP) or
OpenGL/canvas (Clutter) or multimedia (GStreamer)?  Personally I don't
- but I'm trying to learn Clutter right now, and using Eclipse+Java is
a nice way to do that.  There's no way I would feel qualified to try
to rewrite all the documentation and re-type all of the APIs.  Even if
I considered that a useful way to spend my time, which I definitely
don't.

> But just generating
> the code is not really helping. You need (as you already stated) review
> the code. Depending on what your goals are, there can be a lot to be
> done.

Depends on a few variables - for old code like GTK+ with some very
complex APIs, yes, some overrides are going to help a lot.  On the
other hand for smaller and newer libraries like say libnotify or
GUPNP, the existing API is going to be fine.

The GObject introspection work is going to make this even better going
forward, because we will have a --fail-unbindable option to
g-ir-scanner, so if a C library author adds an unbindable or "weird"
function while they're working, their build fails *right then* while
they're developing, rather than binding authors having to figure it
out 6 months to a year (or longer) later.

> This is of course unless the goal is to look more familiar to C
> developers than to Java developers.  But personally I don't see the
> point to tailor Java bindings for C developers

Just as an example, I think using something like JamVM+JGIR would have
been a good way to implement the new GDM.  Now of course the new GDM
is long since rewritten, but java-gnome's coverage of not even close
to all the necessary parts of GTK+, not to mention the non-coverage of
GConf would have completely ruled it out.

Personally, my sense is that a lot of the "Java people" are using
Windows or OS X if they even ever tried our platform, and as I said
before, who I think we need to concentrate on is providing a nice
environment for community developers who do know GTK+, but might not
know Java, looking for a nice IDE (Eclipse) with a working debugger
and a wide collection of usable libraries.  Or at least, that
describes me and a number of people I know.