Re: Feasibility: Java based API access to gnokii

[Phil Ashby]

Harsha Ramesh wrote:
> Coming from a pure Java background, I am having a difficult time 
> understanding the source code of gnokii in order to be able to develop 
> any added functionality to the codebase.
>
> I am wondering if it is possible to build the gnokii libraries in Java. 
> I understand that there are a great number of difficulties involved in 
> this, but I would like to know the feasibility of doing the gnokii work 
> in Java.

Hmmn. Interesting question Harsha :)

The majority of libgnokii is bit/byte oriented data processing and state 
management to implement specific protocols for the phone models it 
supports. This would be readily portable to Java which has similar 
capabilities. Some of it however is operating system specific code to 
interface with serial devices and/or Bluetooth and IrDA protocol stacks, 
this would be more difficault to port since Java lacks support for 
communicating directly with devices (no ioctl() support for instance), 
instead it relies on underlying JNI libraries (including the standard 
JVM runtime) for this. This means the common/devices/* code would likely 
have to remain in C, perhaps writing a JNI wrapper around devices.c? It 
would be a *lot* of work to port all the library code however.

If you are thinking of adding features at a higher layer in the protocol 
implementation, then all library code can remain in C, and the JNI 
wrapper could go around the gsm-api.c functions (ie: the entry points to 
libgnokii). This would allow re-implementation / porting of the gnokii 
command line tool to Java. Or perhaps the proposed gnokii device manager 
daemon would be accessible from a pure Java application over DCE/D-BUS 
whatever? It all depends what you want to change...

Phil.