[Xapian-devel] ruby bindings odds and ends

[Olly Betts]

On Thu, May 11, 2006 at 03:13:16PM +0100, James Aylett wrote:
> That sounds about right. Are we using SWIG for Java yet, or still the
> hand-crafted bindings?

It's still the hand-crafted JNI.  I've submitted a patch for SWIG to
support automatic renaming to "lowerCamelCase" which will be in the
next SWIG release, so it's waiting for that currently.

It wouldn't take long to do a Java version using SWIG, though keeping
100% compatibility would add a fair amount of time I suspect.  I'm not
sure how far to go there really - we don't hear much from Java bindings
users, which might mean they work really well or just that there aren't
many users.  I suspect the latter, since many Java programmers will opt
for the "pure Java" solution given half a chance, and Lucene is written
in Java.

I suspect being able to support CNI might actually increase usage by
making them more appealing to GCJ users who probably tend to be more
open to non-pure java solutions.

Cheers,
    Olly