Hi, Ashley Yakeley wrote:
Is Lambada (the Haskell-JNI bridge) gone? The web-page has disappeared. Using Java seems by far the most obvious way of getting all that GUI/network/SQL/whatever functionality, especially as the Java platform is almost ubiquitous (unlike .NET, Tk, X, GTK+, Win32 GDI, etc.).
I'll let Erik and Sigbjorn speak to the status of Lambada. When I asked them about this a few months ago, it was no longer under active development. I have heard mixed reports about its final status. I, too, needed access to some Java libraries (specifically, the Java2D rendering library) from Haskell, so I made my own system (based on GreenCard) that allows Haskell to call Java code via the JNI. While my system is somewhat limited in functionality (Haskell can call Java, but not the other way around, because GreenCard doesn't seem to support that), the system has been fairly robust thus far. I have written interactive animations in Haskell that are rendered using Java2D and displayed in a Java/Swing window. My system includes a tool to do reflection on Java class files to generate Haskell types and function bindings for Java methods (using the Lambada naming / phantom type conventions), and registers all Java objects as "ForeignObj" values in Haskell so that the Java objects are garbage collected when they are unreachable. I've tested my system under Hugs on Windows 2000, RedHat Linux, and Debian Linux. Please email me if you would like an early release 'snapshot' to play with. We are currently working on some enhancements to the reflection-based binding-generator tool, and then we plan to make a more general release. -antony -- Antony Courtney Grad. Student, Dept. of Computer Science, Yale University antony@apocalypse.org http://www.apocalypse.org/pub/u/antony