On Fri, 20 Jul 2001, Christopher Cain wrote:
> [snip] Are we talking a specialized wrapper
> targetting specifically the stuff required for JSP, or are we talking
> about a general all-purpose Java wrapper that we could possibly release
> as a separate tool?
>
As an absolute minimum, Jasper doesn't need much -- just a way to invoke
the compiler in a multi-threaded server environment without multiple
instances clashing with each other. Even external processes work, albeit
much more slowly than one would like.
I'm interested in accumulating a list of nicer features that we'd like to
see in a compiler API. Here's some of my initial thoughts:
- Small, fast, lightweight, but generates good (optimized)
bytecodes. (Who says goals can't conflict with each other? :-).
- Full support for all the features currently in, and about to be
added to, the Java Language Specification (i.e. assertions and
generics as soon as possible).
- Written in Java (and so embeddable in the Tomcat JVM) or accessible
easily and reliably via JNI on lots of platforms.
- Published, stable, and supported invocation API.
- Packaged in such a way that multiple compiles can be initiated
simultaneously (on different threads) with no conflicts.
- Accepts source input from configurable-per-class input stream,
not just files.
- Writes the bytecodes of its output to a configurable-per-class
output stream, not just files.
- Accepts its notion of a "class path" for looking up dependencies by
handing it a class loader, instead of a CLASSPATH-type environment.
- Generates debugging information usable to map lines of Java code back
to a non-Java language that the Java code was generated from (i.e.
the outcome of JSR-045).
What did I miss?
Craig McClanahan
