Starting work on a Java version of Metakit

I like Metakit so much, but can't use it directly with my Java 
software,  that I've decided to begin writing a version in Java.  I've 
got a reasonable amount of progress so far in being able to open and 
read a Metakit database.  My initial goal is to be able to fully 
support read-only access to databases, then take a step back, and make 
the design and execution as robust as possible.  I'd like to take this 
opportunity to do better than I usually do at doing test-driven 
development with JUnit and similar tools.  Similarly I want to iterate 
the design to something of very high quality, so expect it to change a 
lot.  After the basic reading is done I'll move on to writing 
databases.

Most of my Java software uses Jacl (the Tcl scripting language in Java) 
so I will be doing a Jacl based interface.  Ultimately I may implement 
an interface like OOMK directly in Java/Jacl without using Snit.

Some issues:

Licensing:  I'll make it available under some open source license 
(perhaps BSD, like Tcl).

Copyright:  Jean-Claude, I'm happy to do anything with 
licensing/copyright that fully respects your development of Metakit.  
At present I'm largely working from the file format information and 
examination of actual files, but have done an almost direct translation 
of the Metakit code that looks for the footer and header of the file.

Name:  Always the most difficult part of a project.  So far I'm calling 
it "MetaJet", but would love suggestions for a different name.

Contributions:
      I would love to have people help with the project.  At the very 
least, once I get the basic reading done I'd appreciate  people testing 
it on their own datasets.  If you'd like to contribute to the 
development of the code let me know.  At some point I'll put it up on a 
CVS server.

Questions:
    Expect a few questions from me as I try to figure out how Metakit 
works.

cheers,

Bruce



Email  [email protected]
Web    www.onemoonscientific.com

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