[kaffe] Benchmarking kaffe using XSLTMark

[Jukka Santala]

On Fri, 31 May 2002, Jukka Santala wrote:
> I suggest yout ake a look at the jar-file index "spec" of Java, this
> sounds a lot like that, so it'd be probably a good idea to look at

Since I don't think it's actually specified anywhere in any kind of
detail, I'll give the basics here. The command "jar -i" indexes the target
jar-file, along with any class-path entries it further specifies, and
saves the index into META-INF/INDEX.LIST in the target jar-file. The
format of the file looks like:

JarIndex-Version: 1.0
 
xsmiles.jar
fi
fi/hut
fi/hut/tml
fi/hut/tml/xsmiles
fi/hut/tml/xsmiles/ecma

lib/xalan.jar
META-INF/services
javax
org
org/apache
org/apache/xalan
org/apache/xalan/client
org/apache/xalan/extensions


[EOF] (Not literal, ofcourse)

Significantly cut the content, since that already indicates the idea. Now,
"jar -i" does many questionable things; it includes paths with no classes
in them (fi, fi/hut, fi/hut/tml for example are just the standard origin
indicators, same for org/apache/xalan, and contain no classes). Does this
help in searching through the index somehow? I doubt it. Conversely, the
META-INF/services above was not auto-generated, but had to be hand-added
to make Sun's JDK pick up the properties specified there.

It seems apparent the jar-file index isn't used all that often presently,
and it's fairly easy to generate on the run. There are caveats, ofcourse;
X-Smiles for example uses an "extension mechanism" to allow dynamically
adding jar-files to the classloader. Any automatic indexing should
probably be capable of handling these kinds of situations as well; altough
I doubt this'll cause much trouble, as it over-rides the default
classloader. You might want to check it against the NetworkClassLoader in
Xsmiles (originally from net.wotonomy.util) anyway.

 -Jukka Santala