jfli Update
Monday, July 12, 2004
Geez, I only just wrote a weblog posting on jfli yesterday and already I need to provide an update! In the last 24 hours, a number of things have happened (some of the following information is from personal email exchanges with Rich Hickey, which he has agreed for me to publish, some of it is from the LispWorks mailing list and some of it is from the new jfli mailing list):
- jfli is now working (without any source code changes) on Linux. The trick is to use the IBM JDK for Linux 1.4.2 rather than the Sun JDK.
- Rich reports that SWT is working on both Win32 and Linux. However, there are still some issues with SWT and LispWorks IDE interaction on Mac OS X.
- Sven Van Caekenberghe has reported success running JBoss remote methods from CL using jfli. Performance (with his sample) was very good.
- Sven has also successfully tried calling JBoss session beans, with security, and transferring arrays of beans back.
- Sven has also (gee Sven, give someone else a chance ;-) ) created an asdf system definition file for jfli (which Rich has added to the distribution).
- There was a question (from Sven, of course) regarding how Garbage Collection is handled in jfli:
"What happens to objects that you create in the jvm using jfli in terms of their lifecycle? Can they become garbage while lisp is still holding references to them, or are they only gc-ed when the last lisp reference is gone?"
Rich replied:
"If you are holding Lisp references, the objects will be held alive on the Java side. When the references are GC'ed by Lisp, they become available for GC in Java (if no other references on Java side). If you find that not to be the case it's a bug."
