Re: japize

[Stuart Ballard]

Brian Jones wrote:
> I feel really dumb for thinking I had to use the 1.1 JVM to get this.  

With very old versions of japize, you did: it used to use reflection. I 
only just removed that option entirely, although it's been "deprecated" 
for ages... it gave unreliable output because reflection can't tell you 
whether a field is a compiletime constant, even if it's static and 
final. It also had a nasty habit of starting up AWT toolkit threads, 
which meant that you needed a System.exit() at the end, and using tons 
of memory because classes loaded by the system classloader are never gc'd.

> Btw, there are entirely too many bytecode libraries out there... Jode,
> gnu.bytecode, Apache's version of the same, and on and on... anyone
> know what the best GPL and BSD compatible ones are?

At the time of writing japize initially (summer of 2000) I evaluated 
gnu.bytecode as well as Jode (I'm not even sure whether Apache's version 
existed at the time) and found that Jode had an API that was better 
suited to what I needed. That doesn't mean it's better, of course, but 
what I needed was something closely analagous to Reflection so that I 
could work with the APIs easily without needing to know details about 
the classfile format or the bodies of methods. At the time, Jode seemed 
to provide that better than gnu.bytecode.

Things may have changed since, or my analysis may have been mistaken, 
but I just thought I'd throw in my 2c...

Stuart.


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Stuart Ballard, Programmer
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