Lets expand the JDK emulation
Sandy McArthur
expanded. This was my motivation for starting the GWTx project. And a
lot of it isn't that hard to thanks to the Apache Harmony project which
is conveniently ASL 2.0 licensed also. The biggest hurdle is they are
targeting Java 5 or 6 and you currently have to strip the generics part
from the sources.
Stuff I've gotten working to at least a minimal extent:
java.beans.PropertyChangeSupport et al:
I find these to be most valuable when writing MVC code that keeps the
mode and view separate as possible. What's nice is these classes work
with minimal alteration in GWT though there are probably some GWT
specific optimizations available.
java.util.StringTokenizer:
Not my favorite JDK class but useful for text processing and Harmony's
versions seem to work with minimal effort.
java.util.logging:
This one is a bit more involved to get it working in webmode but for
GWTx I have it so it compiles and sends all logging to the brower's
/dev/null.
I'm working on getting it to detect and log to Firebug and Firebug
lite, and Safari's and Opera's log methods. I also plan on means to
configure log levels in the host page's meta tags and engineering it
so the GWTCompiler can optimize a lot of it out with the dead code
removal logic I've submitted. I am worried this may explode the compile
time a bit with even more permutations to compute.
Stuff I haven't gotten working:
java.util.ResourceBundle:
A lot of other JRE classes use this, at least internally. Having an
implementation that adapts GWT's I18N support would rock and make it
easier to minimize neutering of other emulated classes.
java.math.BigDecimal and BigInteger:
I've gotten a number of requests for this and I've found pure
JavaScript implementations but I'm not that familiar with JavaScript's
internal number representations and unsure about the licensing on the
pure JavaScript libs I've found.
java.text:
I'd like to see support for MessageFormat and the others but got
stalled because they depended on a lot of other non-emulated classes
and I didn't want to castrate their functionality too much.
Another question I have is there any reason Google wouldn't accept code
derived from Apache Harmony? If I reworked their code and submitted a
patch for the first few items above is there any reason it wouldn't be
accepted?
Apache Harmony:
http://harmony.apache.org/
Firebug:
http://getfirebug.com/
http://getfirebug.com/lite.html