Re: [tcljava-dev] Jacl Status Questions/Survey

[Tom P. <tpo...@ny...>]

On Thu, May 13, 2004 at 04:27:21PM -0400, Bruce Johnson wrote:
> 
> I'm curious about the state of Jacl.  I myself think it's the best 
> thing since sliced bread and am fairly committed to using it in some of 

Agreed.  I seem to use Jacl quite a bit, but mostly in a testing and 
support role.  It's invaluable for me in prototyping some Java code on
the fly before committing the effort to solidify in Java.


> my projects.  On the other hand, there doesn't seem to be much activity 
> on the mailing list or cvs repository these days.  I thought I'd see if 
> people would actually respond to a few questions.
> 
> 1) Is anyone doing active development on Jacl itself?
> 

I've posted a few fixes, and some feature 'improvements'.  I think a few of 
fixes got in, but not my 'improvements'.  My most recent patch, several months
old now for a exception raising bug, is still not in CVS.  


> 2) Is anyone planning on doing development on Jacl in the future?
> 

I'm not doing much 'core' work other than fixing bugs when I find them.
I also pretty much finished up my 'hyde' extension, but haven't yet 
published the current version.  

Some other things I'd like to do are:

 - implement 'fileevent', 'lset', other newer Tcl commands.
 - port as much of tcllib to a 'jacllib' as possible.
 - drop in a new regexp engine, likely the apache/oro one with extended RE's.
 - experiment with a Tcl to Java compiler, I've started on some initial code.
 - profiling to find and hopefully fix some interperter hot spots.
 - create a 'Jaclkit' environment, that bundles Jacl jars + application source
   into a single .jar file, so you can 'java -jar foo.jar' to run your app.
	
I remember that you were doing some compiler work, any progress on that?
My compiler will require some minor changes to the core, simply making 
package level or private classes & methods public instead.  Otherwise, I'm
trying to write all of mine in Tcl, borrowing on others' nifty work.


> 3) Is anyone actively using Jacl in projects?
> 

Only internal projects, one with Swank :-).  I mostly use Jacl for 
testing (JUnit is the wrong tool IMHO, but hard to convince the Java only
crowd at my office.)  I've built a set of Jacl scripts that drive 
performance testing of my company's J2EE product.


> 4) Would anyone be interested in having some Jacl/Swank presence at the 
> upcoming Tcl/Tk 2004 conference (talks, tutorials, BOFS)?
> 

I'd just like to make it to N.O. for the conference, it's a slim chance 
at the moment.  Having a Jacl presence might make a slightly easier sell to
my company to send me, but that's still a stretch for me at the moment.

> 5) Any thoughts on promoting the use of Jacl?
> 

In the open source world, releasing early and often seem to be one of the keys
to exposure.  Of course that means having a fair amount of time to devote to
it, fixing bugs, adding features.  I can't fault anyone else at this, 
as I myself can't devote much time.  Not enough hours in the day to do
it all.  

Perhaps some more noise on comp.lang.tcl from the Jacl folks.  


-- 
Tom Poindexter
tpo...@ny...
http://www.nyx.net/~tpoindex/