Re: Feasibility: Java based API access to gnokii

[Harsha Ramesh]

Hi Phil,

Thanks for your reply.Building a wrapper around the libgnokii sounds like a good idea. Please correct me if I am wrong. From my understanding of your reply, the core of gnokii is the libgnokii code. Writing a wrapper around the libgnokii would be sufficient for the higher level Java based API access?????

What about building device specific code? Does that have to be in C?? or could that be built in Java??

I agree about the fact that currently Java does not support standards on communicating on BT and IrDA. Since gnokii is about building Nokia drivers for the *nix platform, I think we can build a prototype that works on the linux system alone.

I shall look at the gsm-api.c file and see what I can understand and then post back my queries.

thanks for your inputs.

regards,
Harsha

On 1/19/06, Phil Ashby <address@hidden> wrote:

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.


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