KDE.org: Java Mania: An Interview With Richard Dale

[ Thanks to Navindra
Umanee for this link. ]

“One of the most fascinating aspects of KDE is the speed with
which new developments occur after each release. KDE 2.1 came out
yesterday, and was celebrated in the traditional manner by adding
lots of new features to the KDE development tree in CVS. For me,
one of the most exciting things to arrive was a very large commit
to the kdebindings module (used for bindings between KDE’s C++ code
and other programing languages) which added bindings for the KDE
and Qt libraries to the well known Java language. The author of the
code, Richard Dale, has kindly agreed to answer some questions so
that readers of the Dot can get up to speed with this new addition
to KDE.”

“1. What do QtJava and KDEJava actually do?”

“They wrap most of the classes in Qt and KDE so that they can be
used to write Java programs, which look and behave identically to a
C++ version. The Qt date, time, string and list classes are
replaced with their Java equivalents.”

“2. What would you say are the best features of the
binding?”

“It uses KDOC as the parser engine, so it has access to the
documentation comments of the KDE methods. It translates these
comments into Javadoc format, and has a go at translating the code
snippets into ‘cod java’ – ie C++ with those funny symbols like
‘&’, ‘*’, ‘::’ (that you never quite mastered 😉 ) replaced
with java style ‘.’s.”

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