[mbackup-devel] Java?

[James O'K. <jo...@mi...>]

I've been considering moving from C to Java.
The first thing I can think of that people will complain about is that
java is slow, and from what I've seen it's not too bad on long running
process that use the JIT compiler like hotspot. And graphics are slow, but
we wont' be doing many graphics, so given that we'll already be IO bound,
I don't think speed will be an issue for this.

The big things that Java will get us is easier cross platform coding,
easier network coding, easier encryption coding, less chance of memory
leaks and no pointers to screw up.

One thing that will be a bit difficult is java tries to be a common
ground, so it leaves out things like stat().

What I need to know from someone is what metadata that different
filesystems have that is different from posix. For example, BeOS keeps
arbitrary number of attributes about a file such as it's mime type and the
To: and From: if it's an email for example. I'd like to try and make a 
class that covers all possibly filesystems. I guess the ones in question
are BeOS, Novell, and Windows 2000/NT/98. I also need to know about
filesystem attributes like the windows registry that need special care in
backing up.


Don't worry if you were dieing to write in C/C++, I'm sure that there will
still be some code to be done.. :) And I'm also not 100% sure I want to
make this change or not.

-james