[ome-devel] jvmlink

[Curtis Rueden]

Hi Mario,

Good to hear from you! I am CCing the OME-devel list, since this
conversation may be of interest to others.

I looked at your Jvmlink software, that makes an interface between C++ and
> Java via sockets. I had to adapt the code for Unix (Linux, to be more
> precise). Are you still interested in maintaining this code? Are there
> newer
> versions than the one from LOCI SVN (in legacy subtree)?
>

The short answer is: I am not interested in maintaining the JVMLink code.
And there is not a newer version that what you found in SVN. (But I would
be happy to give you commit access to the LOCI SVN repository, if you would
like to commit your changes to the codebase!)

The reason is: there are a plethora of ways to enable inter-process
communication between C++ and Java (as well as a slew of other languages):
ZeroC Ice (as I mentioned to you in Paris); Apache Thrift, Hessian, Etch,
zeromq, Gearman... it's a long list. JVMLink was written from scratch and
makes NO considerations for security, which is of central importance when
utilizing the network stack. All of the aforementioned tools provide a
mechanism to avoid globally exposing your application over the network,
unlike JVMLink. And all of them have had a lot more development time and
design work focusing on performance, usability, etc.—which we simply cannot
match for an unfunded one-off project like JVMLink.

What I want to do in the future is provide better cross-language
inter-process access to Bio-Formats. As I said in Paris, Bio-Formats Ice
bindings would be nice, if I had any time to work on them. But right now I
am too busy with ImageJ2.

Another vital area to explore is compiling Bio-Formats with GCJ so that you
can use it as native code. GCJ has been around for 15+ years and gotten
quite good. Have you tried it?

The good news is that even though I personally do not have time, the OME
team now has funding to pursue these things, and is currently hiring. So
hopefully we will finally see substantial progress in coming months.

Again, I would be happy to grant you commit access to JVMLink so that you
can hack away, if you still decide to use it going forward. I just wanted
to fill you in on our perspective, and why we haven't developed it further.

Regards,
Curtis


On Thu, Nov 10, 2011 at 6:12 AM, Mario Emmenlauer <mario at emmenlauer.de>wrote:

> Dear Curtis,
>
> I'm picking up on an old talk here, we had at the OME UGM 2010 in Paris.
> I looked at your Jvmlink software, that makes an interface between C++ and
> Java via sockets. I had to adapt the code for Unix (Linux, to be more
> precise). Are you still interested in maintaining this code? Are there
> newer
> versions than the one from LOCI SVN (in legacy subtree)?
>
> Attached you can find a work-in-progress. Its your code, with some
> extensions for Unix. I have made some smaller changes in other places as
> well, for example const'ed some strings where possible. A main difference
> is to use a call to "write(byte[], ...)" in Java that writes the full
> byte[] array in one go (as opposed to byte-wise). This speeds up large
> transmissions thousandfold!
>
> If you like my code, please add it to your SVN for distribution. But
> beware, it is work in progress, and I checked it only on Linux. I did not
> check it on Windows (yet), I might have accidentally broken something.
>
> Anyways, all feedback from you is very welcome! Let me know if there are
> newer versions of your code, or if you know better libraries to fill this
> gap. Also let me know if you want to be informed about my changes at all
> :-)
>
> Cheers,
>
>    Mario (from XuvTools / libBlitzBioFormats)
>
>
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