[tcljava-user] creating and using safe interpreter in jacl

[Andrew G. <and...@in...>]

I have been working on a Tcl plugin for JSPWiki using Jacl 1.3.1. I have
have little trouble integrating the two tools up to this point. Two
remaining tasks are to 1) use a safe interpreter and 2) reuse a master
interpreter retained for each thread.

It is not clear to me how to make a safe interpreter. Tracking the jacl
code it looks like I can

   Interp masterInterp = new Interp();
   TclObject safeInterpName = ...
   Interp safeInterp = InterpSlaveCmd.create( masterInterp,
      safeInterpName, true /* safe */ );

and now use safeInterp as I used masterInterp before. The coding does not
feel right -- using another class's convenience method to create the
interpreter -- and so am not confident it is right. Can anyone confirm
that this is correct?

The second issue is reusing and retaining a master interpreter for each
thread. What I am trying to achieve is good performance within the
JSPWiki. JSPWiki creates a new instance of the plugin for each use on the
wiki page. A wiki page with 10 uses of the plugin will have 10 plugin
instances created. If each plugin instance needs to initialize an
interpreter with lots of tcl code then the performance will be poor. What
I hoped to do was associate a master interpreter with each thread. This
interpreter would be loaded with the initialization tcl code. Now when the
plugin is instanced a safe interpreter is created and associated with the
thread's master interpreter. I can see how the mechanics of this would be
work in Java. What I don't know is whether Jacl will work in this context.
(Note that only one thread is ever using the two interpreters.) Can anyone
confirm that what I am trying to do will work?

For more information about the JSPWiki Tcl plugin see

   http://www.jspwiki.org/Wiki.jsp?page=TclPlugin

Thank you.

-- Andrew Gilmartin