General talk about software patterns

[Pascal Costanza <pascal AT p-cos.net>]

Jason Baragry wrote:

> G'Day,
> Sorry for the off-topic question but the recent lisp discussion made me
> think this was a good group of people to ask.
> Does anyone know of a good lisp - java integration package? Specifically,
> some way for Java to interpret Lisp expressions.
> We have a lisp-based workflow engine that we want to add a Java client to.
> However, the best package we have found, Jatha
> (http://jatha.sourceforge.net/), doesn't seem to handle lisp structures.

I don't know enough about jatha, but Armed Bear Lisp seems to be a good 
choice here. See http://www.cliki.net/Armed%20Bear%20Lisp - they seem to 
have very good community support.

There exist also other solutions for integrating Java and Common Lisp. 
Opening a socket and using some protocol to have Lisp and Java talk to 
each other is pretty obvious, and there are several libraries that do 
that. However, there also more interesting approaches: Jfli is a library 
for Common Lisp that loads a Java runtime dll into the Lisp process in 
order to make use of Java from the Lisp side. See 
http://jfli.sourceforge.net/ - the author of that library seems to use 
it for its own work. Linj is a compiler for a subset of Common Lisp that 
translates directly into Java source code. Again, the author of that 
library uses it in a real-world project which has the requirement to 
accept only human-readable Java source code, so Linj focuses on 
producing Java code as if written by hand. ;) See 
http://www.evaluator.pt/ in the Downloads section.

Another option is to go for Scheme since there exist various Scheme 
implementations for Java, like SISC, JScheme and Kawa. (Personally, I 
don't like Scheme and strongly prefer Common Lisp, but your mileage may 
vary.)


I hope this helps.

Pascal