Stefano Mazzocchi wrote:
Geir Magnusson Jr wrote:
Jim Jagielski wrote:
On Feb 10, 2006, at 9:54 AM, Stefano Mazzocchi wrote:
It also has a major social side effects: it would create the
ultimate social bridge between the HTTPD/APR side of the foundation
and the java side of the foundation, maybe allowing people from one
side to contribute to the other, or, at least to help out in the
interface between them which naturally is the JVM.
What do you think?
Tomcat is APR aware via JNI (for connectors), and when it uses APR
has some *very* appreciable enhancements :)
Heh. The reason is because they are taking a different approach to
IO, right?
IOW, my guess is that if the Sun JVM used APR, nothing would change,
because the problem is the standard Java APIs, not the integration of
the VM w/ the OS services. My understanding is that the Tomcat peeps
just found a more optimal path to the OS services they needed for
their specific problem.
Geir, I'm not proposed we expose a java APR API instead of the standard
java API, that's not the point.
I know.
My point is that a JVM has a lot of native hooks, by design. And that
those native hooks will have to be ported across operating systems and
that APR was designed to separate those OS dependencies from the Apache
2 codebase so that the web server could be built with some sort of 'OS
abstraction' in mind.
therefore, my suggestion is: instead of hooking our native stuff to the
OS directly (or to the standard C libraries) we should hook them up to
something that is a little more abstract and therefore reduces the
effort of porting across OSes.
Yes - understood.
That's the notion of the "OS Portability Interface" as part of the
modularity story. "If you implement these calls/interfaces/whatever,
you can plug that into the VM"
So I don't imagine we'd ever tie the VM to any given OS, but rather let
it be a pluggable thing, and I'd imagine that the "pluggable things"
that we write and distribute would be APR-powered. This lets us
leverage APR (we're fundamentally lazy, after all) yet still allow
people who dont' want to use APR or can't because of some issue on the
platform they are porting to to do what they need to.
As you note, if we do this right, the java users wouldn't be able to
tell a difference (if not, maybe, performance), but the difference would
be in lowing the costs of porting the native code across different OSes.
Right.
But then again, since I'm not the one doing the coding, I'll be happy to
let do-ocracy take place.. I just thought I mentioned it since others
might not know of APR's existance and Apache HTTPD and Tomcat
connectors's dependency on it (which means it's there to stay and it's
heavily maintained and licensing compatible)
I think that you are right on the money (modulo the VM's interface) and
I'd bet real money that we will be heavily dependent on - and
contributors to - APR in the near future.
geir
- Re: Using APR for Harmony's native link to the OS? Geir Magnusson Jr
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