[kaffe] Build system for kjc / external jars + Jetty/JSP success

[Jim Pick]

Hi,

I played around a bit on the weekend with Jetty, and trying to get it
working on top of Kaffe with JSPs.  Out of the box, Jetty works with the
latest CVS, but not the JSPs.  I really wanted to get JSPs working with
something that supports the Servlet 2.3 spec, since I've been playing
around with doing some really cool stuff using JSTL.  I want to switch
Kaffe.org over to something that runs on Kaffe.  :-)

It took me all weekend to figure out what was going wrong, and to come
up with a fix.  Jetty uses Jasper (from Tomcat) to generate the Java
code, which then gets turned into a class file using the "javac" task
from ant.jar (using -Dbuild.compiler=kjc).  It turns out that, by
default, kjc likes to stick the compiled .class files in the current
directory, instead of in the same directory as the source .java file, as
javac does.

I cooked up a crude patch against kjc which seems to work. 
Unfortunately, it's a big mangled since I rearranged the kjc source dirs
so I could get it to fit into Eclipse (which expects the sources to be
laid out javac-style).  I need to clean it up.

What we're currently lacking is a build system for rebuilding kjc.jar.

I'd like to propose a new top level module in CVS where we can check in
a build system for generating "external jars" that get shipped along
with Kaffe.  Kjc is on such "external jar".

For documentation purposes, I'd also like to ship some additional jars,
eg. an XSLT engine, docbook stylesheets, a cut-down version of ant (with
needed Kaffe hacks), etc.  There might be additional jars we might want
to pack into the shipping tarball.

I'm proposing we call it "kaffe-external-jars".  Having only spent 30
seconds thinking of the right name for it, I'm open to a less wordy name
for the module.  I'd like to avoid checking in binaries.  Instead, we
could do something more along the lines of a BSD-style "ports" system,
where we'd have scripts that would download the "pristine" source
tarballs, and apply patches against them, and build our jar files, which
could then be checked into the main Kaffe tree, as needed.

What do people think of that?  I'm open to alternate ideas.

Cheers,

 - Jim