I like Metakit so much, but can't use it directly with my Java software, that I've decided to begin writing a version in Java. I've got a reasonable amount of progress so far in being able to open and read a Metakit database. My initial goal is to be able to fully support read-only access to databases, then take a step back, and make the design and execution as robust as possible. I'd like to take this opportunity to do better than I usually do at doing test-driven development with JUnit and similar tools. Similarly I want to iterate the design to something of very high quality, so expect it to change a lot. After the basic reading is done I'll move on to writing databases.

Most of my Java software uses Jacl (the Tcl scripting language in Java) so I will be doing a Jacl based interface. Ultimately I may implement an interface like OOMK directly in Java/Jacl without using Snit.

Some issues:

Licensing: I'll make it available under some open source license (perhaps BSD, like Tcl).

Copyright: Jean-Claude, I'm happy to do anything with licensing/copyright that fully respects your development of Metakit. At present I'm largely working from the file format information and examination of actual files, but have done an almost direct translation of the Metakit code that looks for the footer and header of the file.

Name: Always the most difficult part of a project. So far I'm calling it "MetaJet", but would love suggestions for a different name.

Contributions:
I would love to have people help with the project. At the very least, once I get the basic reading done I'd appreciate people testing it on their own datasets. If you'd like to contribute to the development of the code let me know. At some point I'll put it up on a CVS server.


Questions:
Expect a few questions from me as I try to figure out how Metakit works.


cheers,

Bruce



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