Re: [tcljava-dev] Jacl help offer

[Mo D. <su...@ba...>]

On Wed, 02 Jan 2002 14:05:42 -0500
Shawn Boyce <sh...@qc...> wrote:

> I'm willing to help out with Jacl 1.3. What are areas that need addressing?
> I didn't see major items in the diffs.txt file that were not being 
> worked on
> (ie. channel I/O and socket).

Well, some IO areas are being worked on but others could still use some work.
For example, async IO and pipes still need to be implemented. These are
not currently being targeted in the Channel rewrite.

> My main interest is reducing the number of differences
> with Tcl so that I can just point users to the "standard"
> Tcl books and not have to explain what's missing.

There are not a lot of features left to implement, but the
ones that are left can be rather tricky. Perhaps a good
place to get started with the code would be in the
exec command. A new version of the exec() API was
added in JDK 1.3:

http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.3/docs/api/java/lang/Runtime.html#exec(java.lang.String[], java.lang.String[], java.io.File)

The current exec code in src/jacl/tcl/lang/ExecCmd.java does this really
scary/nasty hack that involves writing out tmp files and then execing
sh on them. It would be better if we could just make use of this new
exec API. Trick is, Jacl needs to continue to run on a JDK 1.1 system
so one would need to invoke the method at runtime through an
interface and compile the class only when compiling with a newer
version of Java. It might be easier to try to invoke this method via
the reflection interface. How does that sound?

If you want a bigger challenge after that, the automated test cases
could use a lot of work.

Mo