[Biojava-l] byte-code generator

[Matthew Pocock]

Hi.

Those of you working form the cvs repository may have noticed that there
is a new file called bytecode.jar in there. It is a fully functional
library for generating java byte-code and then loading and running this
code (credits: Thomas did most of the coding, he and I designed it & I
have done some debugging). It can be effectively used as a
macro-assembler for the Java VM. In the core biojava project it is
currently used for generating the projected feature proxies (magic
supplied by thomas), and in my experimental dynamic-programming
compiler.

We intend to release the bytecode generater under lgpl as a seperate
package to biojava. It is currently in a cvs module called bytecode (a
sister project to biojava-live). It has a sepreate development cycle to
biojava, so it is apropreate to keep releases of each one seperate. As
far as we are aware, it is the only open-source program of it's kind (we
may be wrong - tell us). It also has the cleanest API of any of the
bytecode generaters that I evaluated (of course, I would say that!). It
is light-weight enough that generating classes is not noticably more
expensive than loading byte-code direct from disk.

If you are interested in this functionality, feel free to check out the
bytecode module from anonymous CVS.

It is currently under (un) documented. This is bleeding-edge stuff, so
treat it carefully. If it doesn't do what you expect, then it may well
be doing the wrong thing. As always, all questions, bugs, ideas, flames
gratefully recieved.

Matthew Pocock