With the GPL’ing of Java and Lucene’s pending move to using Java 1.5,
I decided to give PyLucene without gcj a try.

One of the best features of gcj is its C++ interface. Its ability to expose Java classes as C++ makes it very easy to invoke Java from C++. This feature is unique and sorely missed when moving off of gcj.

The Java Native Invocation Interface makes it possible to invoke Java
classes from C++ but is rather crufty and verbose to use by hand.

I started by implementing a C++ code generator that generates C++ wrapper
classes that hide all the JNI invocation cruft from the C++ programmer.
These wrapper classes in effect offer a very similar C++ interface to what
is offered by gcj’s CNI.

While I was implementing this it became apparent that the C++ wrappers for
giving access to Java classes from Python could be generated at the same
time.

Eventually, I ended up writing a new C++ code generator, that I called jcc.
JCC is able to generate C++ wrappers for accessing Java classes from Python
and C++.

This code generator is now used to generate a new flavor of PyLucene, called
PyLucene with JCC. JCC has no built-in knowledge about Lucene and could be
used to generate wrappers for any Java library that uses similar coding
styles and techniques than the ones used by the Java Lucene developers.

JCC could in fact become a project of its own. At the moment, it is part of the
PyLucene with JCC source tree.

The PyLucene source tree got split into two forks, a gcj fork containing the
original PyLucene and a new jcc fork containing the new sources, consisting
mainly of unit tests, samples and the sources to jcc since all of
PyLucene, except for extension code, is now generated by jcc.

For more details, please refer to the new README files:

• PyLucene README
• PyLucene with JCC README
• jcc README

Java Lucene 1.9 was finally released this Monday. PyLucene 1.9 is now available.

PyLucene is a GCJ-compiled version of Java Lucene integrated with Python via SWIG. Its goal is to allow you to use Lucene’s text indexing and searching capabilities from Python. It is designed to be API compatible with the latest version of Java Lucene.
PyLucene 1.0 is available from its homepage.

Long overdue, but here at last…

Andi Vajda and I participated in Europython 2005 this summer. I gave a Chandler presentation, and Andi gave a presentation on PyLucene. Both were reasonably well attended.

I also did an M2Crypto sprint, and while I got a lot done there are still some loose ends before we can do the next M2Crypto release.

We met lots of interesting people and saw interesting presentations. There were some calendar projects presented that we obviously need to take a closer look at.

You can read more in my post to the dev mailing list in here.

I will be in Europython 2005 from June 27 to July 1. I will be giving a presentation of Chandler in the business track.

I have also spared the last two days for an M2Crypto sprint. We are using M2Crypto in Chandler for the crypto/SSL stuff.

Andi Vajda is the other OSAF developer going to Europython. Andi is giving a talk on PyLucene. PyLucene will provide full text search for Chandler.

We’d be happy to talk with you about all Chandler-related stuff.

PyCon 2005, the Python conference, http://www.pycon.org is the week of March 21 in Washington D.C. There will be a fairly sizable representation from OSAF this year. We will be doing two presentations, one on building Chandler parcels and one on PyLucene. Thursday night there will be a Chandler BOF session.

In addition, Ted Leung will be leading a two day Developer Tutorial and Sprint during the pre-conference sprints on March 21 & 22. And if you are interested in PyLucene, Andi Vajda will be one of the OSAF’ers at the sprints, so there will be opportunities to do PyLucene stuff as well.

The Developer Sprint will be the first time we get to test out the “Developer Dogfood” aspects of Chandler and see if open source community developers can understand our architecture and APIs, and actually build a working Chandler Parcel from scratch in 2 days.