[HEADS UP] JLine 3 discussion

[Guillaume Nodet]

I've pushed a branch that could be the start of a JLine 3.0 line at 

   https://github.com/jline/jline2/tree/jline3

You may not be able to compile it yet, as it requires some jansi additions that are not yet available, as I haven't find a way to push snapshots yet.

Anyway, here are the main changes:

  * full new API which mainly consists in Console (which provides a character based reader and writer) and Reader which provides the readLine() methods)

  * low level access to the posix console in native mode (the stty calls have been replaced with tcgetattr / tcsetattr native calls

    We should be able to provide back support to avoid native calls for those consoles, though the windows support will always require native calls

  * better non system console support (mostly for socket based consoles, either telnet or ssh for example)

    It supports either real posix consoles or an emulated console.

  * better support for signals

  * no static configuration

The switch to native calls is mainly for performance reasons, to avoid using exec() whenever we read the terminal size or attributes.  I don't see any problem in bringing back the previous method to avoid native calls.

Full access to console settings will allow fixing all the problems with echo, cr/lf, etc... by configuring the console correctly.

Low level streams access has been removed from the API, as the console is really a character based console, not a byte stream.

One possible improvement would be to merge Console and Reader so that Console would have readLine() methods and be compatible to the java 6 java.io.Console class.  The reason why I haven't done that yet is that while the Console has not much configuration, the Reader has a lot of options, so I'm not really sure if this is a good idea to do it or not.

I'll try to push jansi snapshots somewhere so that people can try it out.

Fwiw, it hasn't been much tested, so there's still a lot of bug fixing to do before it's in a real stable state.

I'm open to discuss any points and eager to ear suggestions...

Cheers,

Guillaume Nodet

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Guillaume Nodet
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Red Hat, Open Source Integration

Email: gno...@redhat.com
Web: http://fusesource.com
Blog: http://gnodet.blogspot.com/