Think I've got the .class file format sussed now. Or at least, I can generated classes which validate and run correctly, so if I haven't got it right, we really should be worrying. The library is still missing a few bits and bobs, but it's complete enough to unblock our work on BioJava.
Real life: Beautiful, sunny day -- you really wouldn't tell it was October. Now why didn't they listen to my plan for wireless Ethernet in the gardens? *sigh*.
Re: scripting languages. Nice to see some support for Tcl, even if my gentlemanly credentials are at stake here. I quite agree about treating it as a C library. It's also good for scripting Java objects using TclBlend or Jacl. For tasks where there's a good Java class library, this combination lets you get a script up and running very quickly.
Had full-on exposure to the Sun .class file format today. I've always been reasonably happy with most of the bytecode itself, but haven't had much reason to look at the whole file format until now. It seems to be quite heavily tied to the guts of Sun's classic VM. I guess I now have a better idea why writing a cleanroom VM is such a major undertaking. The schedule for the bytecode library has slipped slightly since my parents turned up in Cambridge, but maybe I'll get it finished tonight.
Real life: looking around for something a bit more active to do (but preferably not too much running round in circle). I think I might give fencing a try.
The EnsEMBL converter seems to be done now. Now to let it chug through the whole database (slow...), and see if there are any special cases I've managed to miss.
I'm now writing a Java bytecode generation library so that we can use dynamically generated classes in BioJava. To my surprise, there didn't seem to be a complete one available under the LGPL, so it's more coding for Thomas. Hopefully have some kind of release ready early next week.
Fighting the APIs for EnsEMBL. I'm currently trying to import some data from an old custom database into the SQL tables used by EnsEMBL. Good plan in itself, pity I've been cornered into writing it in Perl. This is the first time I've had to use Perl in anger for a couple of years. Rant! Rave! Never again! etc. But I've said that before ;-(.
Wahey! After the best part of a year in purchasing/accounts hell, they've finally managed to get me a new computer. I wonder if this is meant to make me more productive...
New HTML Parser: The long-awaited libxml2 based HTML parser code is live. It needs further work but already handles most markup better than the original parser.
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