JCPP Project

[Mario Torre]

2015-04-10 14:48 GMT+02:00 Chacha Chacha <chachaparis at gmail.com>:
> Hi John,
>
> The listed project solve the following problem: I am a Java developer, I
> need a C/C++ functionality that doesn't exist in Java how can I use it
>
> The problem that I am trying to solve is different and the following.
> Imagine a 30 years old financial software company. Initially it started
> with C development and few developers. With time and success, they got more
> market, more money, more developers, more millions of line of C code.
>
> In the early 2000, Java becomes a serious technology for the front end and
> the back end. So they decide to inject Java in their software, for the
> front end and some few multi-threaded servers.  Currently, 90% of their
> software is developed with C/C++ with 200 developers, and 10% developed
> with Java with few dozens developers.
> The majority of developers and management would like to use Java, but
> reality catches up.
>
> In that context, it is very hard to say just rewrite everything from
> scratch in Java.
> Several strategies were tried with little success:
>
>     1. In pure C/C++ process call through jni Java methods. Not scalable,
> hard to debug and maintain
>
>     2. Isolate some modules developed in C++ and redevelop them in Java
>      In that case, how process developed in Java and in C++ should call
> each other?
>      Using different kind of RPC technologies, different kind of protocols.
> None of tried solutions during the last decade was scalable and efficient
> enough (Corba, SOAP, WebServices, REST, ProtoBuf, ...)
>
>
> The bulk that is in C/C++ is forbidding them to have solutions where Java
> is involved and has a bigger place in the product.
>
> My approach was to say, among the C/C++ code, we can inject some Java
> related technologies and concepts that will allow the following:
>
>     1. C/C++ developers willing to move to Java will be happy to have that
> technology in their ecosystem as it is like Java
>
>     2. It is a step closer to shift everything to Java
>
>     3. Best way to implement interoperability between C/C++ and Java
>
>
> I understand that I am describing a special case where the legacy code is
> so important that it cant be redeveloped using Java.
> We don't encounter such thing every day, only in big companies maybe...
>
> It would be a pity if Oracle and the Java engineers don't take that into
> account at certain moment.
> Of course, tell me if something that I described is not clear.

Maybe I'm not following you, but you can very well replace portions of
your application with Java and keep most of it running as native code,
and John Rose gave you exactly the pointers needed to help out in this
task (you can even start a virtual machine from a C application btw -
this is so flexible that you could in theory even never write a line
of java code and execute everything via JNI! [1])

Now, a nice native API that maps 1-to-1 with Java maybe be nice to
have, however there are valid alternatives that expose similar
concepts, look at QT, or the Objective C libraries.

Your project seems to be something like that, but as much as a nice
and even interesting idea, I think it's entirely off-topic for Java.

This is something perhaps more interesting from a Java perspective
that you may want to look (and perhaps contribute!):

http://openjdk.java.net/jeps/191

Cheers,
Mario

[1] And yes, I've seen that too!! :S

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