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Re: RFH: compiling java with kaffe/jikes/ant



Laszlo 'GCS' Boszormenyi wrote:
Hi Dalibor,

* Dalibor Topic <robilad@kaffe.org> [2004-09-04 13:59:58 +0200]:
                         ^^^^^^^^^-- Huh? :)

Hi Laszlo,

If you want a nice kaffe.org e-mail address too, that comes with CVS write access to kaffe source tree ;)

thank you for your kind bug report.

 I have to thank you for helping me. I was able to fix it by passing
"-Dbuild.compiler=jikes" to ant.

I'm glad that it was so easy to fix.

Please file a wishlist bug report with ant developers for that.

 Will do.


Thank you.

Sun's tools.jar is completely undocumented. It is rumoured to contain their javac compiler, and may contain other classes that are not part of the specified Java APIs.

 As bytecode can be reverse engineered, one can check it out what those
classes do. I tend to think someone already do that.


Reverse engineering undocumented, unspecified code has its own set of problems. Beside the possible legal issues with reverse engineering in some jurisdictions, the undocumented code, ebing implementation dependant, tends to change every now and then in unpredictable fashion, leading to repetition of effort spent to get the same information again. It's uneconomical. ;)

It's simpler to kindly ask developers using undocumented code to use other, documented interfaces, and to point them to alternatives, if such are known.

For example, a small fraction of Java developers seems to have picked up a bad habit of using sun.dont.use.me.please.Base64 class to do Base64 encoding & decoding. Politely pointing them to the ASL licensed Base64 codec in the jakarta commons codec project usually works wonders. ;)

Sun actually condemns the use of those undocumented APIs, but it doesn't seem to prevent people from abusing them ;)

 That's the real problem. :(

It's just an educational issue ;) In particular, as free runtimes are catching up with the non-free ones in terms of features & API coverage, there is goodwill from fellow open source Java developers to help overcome such small hurdless to running their applications on free software.

Run anywhere, yeah, right ;)

 Write once, Debug everywhere. :) Sorry, bad joke.

It says 'run anywhere'. It doesn't say anything about 'run alike' ;)

Anyway, off to check what does this mean:
    [javac]     49. import javax.swing.text.html.parser.ParserDelegator;
    [javac]                ^------------------------------------------^
    [javac] *** Semantic Error: The import
"javax/swing/text/html/parser/ParserDelegator" is not valid, since it
does not name a type in a package.

You've found a missing feature ;)

Actually, the class exists now in GNU Classpath and kaffe's CVS, but it's just stubbed out. A volunteer [1] to implement & document it would be most welcome. It shouldn't be too hard ;)

You can find the current standings in terms of API coverage on http://www.kaffe.org/~stuart/japi/

cheers,
dalibor topic

[1] The usual taintedness conditions apply ...



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