[sword-devel] My personal OpenSource ideologies

[Bobby Nations]

Mike,

My shallow understanding of things.

STL is short for the Standard Template Library in C++.  It was originally
implemented by HP and later became a part of the standard.  The STL consists
of generic implementations of most of what the average programmer will ever
need in regard to containers for their objects and algorithms to manipulate
them.  The best thing about it is it's generic nature.  You don't have to
subclass or cast anyting to use them; just crank them up and let them go.

The collections classes in Java 2 mimic the STL in many ways, but are less
elegant than STL because you have to cast everything to the appropriate
object type when retrieving from a collection.  IMHO, the lack of templates
and operator overloading are among the two biggest shortcomings in Java
(sometimes the lack of reliable destructors moves up the list as well :-|).

Hope that helps.

Bobby

BTW, sorry for posting the ant build file twice.  Gnome crashed on me during
the middle of sending the first email, and I wasn't certain if it would make
it or not.


Mike Dougherty wrote:

> I'm not going to debate anyone's specific views on Open Source and/or
> Java development. I'll just put to you all what I think and you can take
> it for what it's worth.
>
> I am an Open Source advocate. I am not a good evangelist, with either
> truth that I believe (The Gospel of Christ and Open Source for those
> that may not have put that together). But I believe whole heartedly in
> both and desire to use the talents, skills, and gifts available to me to
> further them.
>
> I also have thoughts and opinions on the roles, as I see them, for Open
> Source and commercial software in the future. But this is probably not
> the right place to share them now.
>
> In regards to JGL. I do not think we should use this library. I have not
> read any compelling reason why JSword should be tied to a library that
> seems to be questionable at best. As I read the license, I wasn't even
> sure we could distribute it with JSword without obtaining permission to
> do so from ObjectSpace. I also got the impression that Crosswire might
> be in violation of the license by hosting the help and api documentation
> on its web site. But I am not a lawyer so I may not have understood it
> correctly.
>
> I would also like to raise a point about the project and its Java
> implementation specifically. While I agree (for the most part) that the
> Java API should remain as close to the original C++ API as possible (at
> least where it doesn't conflict with Java conventions or standards), I
> do NOT agree that the implementation should be mimicked. Java and C++ do
> things in a different way. To the best of my knowledge there is no way
> to directly port the code from one language to another. That is why I am
> trying to understand the C++ library, what it does and its intention,
> not just modifying the syntax so that it will compile with the Java
> compiler. I mention this because maybe it was important and necessary to
> use STL (BTW, what is that?) for C++, but it may not be necessary for
> Java. It may have been necessary to use a Multimap in C++ which may not
> be necessary in Java (I have already posed one possible solution to this
> challenge). This is the way I plan to code and contribute, anyway.
>
> Just my opinion,
> /mike
>
> --
> ******************************************
>  Mike Dougherty -- Java Software Engineer
> ******************************************
>  Operator, please trace this call and tell me where I am.