[Attempting to move this discussion to chirp_devel]
On 5/20/2014 11:06 AM, Al Szymanski wrote:
My thoughts are that by putting the entire application in Java, then there would be no platform dependencies at all. ( wishful thinking )
I don't mean to discourage you from doing your project but to set expectations correctly: it's wishing thinking that a Java port would remove platform dependencies, especially for an application that requires serial port access.
The majority of problems people run into is getting the correct operating system (Windows, Mac OX) USB driver installed for their USB serial cable. This is complicated by the whole cheap counterfeit prolific chip debacle.
Even a Java application still needs the OS level device driver support to be there like any native application. So none of those problems go away.
Worse, serial support in Java introduces additional complexity as additional platform specific native code, usually in the form of shared libraries (.dlls, .so's, etc.) that need to be available to the JVM. So if you want to reduce installation pain, you need to distribute those platform specific binaries with your Java app. Now when there are problems with the serial port, you've added a whole additional layer to debug which helps obfuscate the process.
Note: For the people on Windows, chirp is distributed as a compiled package with all of the necessary dependencies using a python compiler. The one remaining platform dependency is getting Windows to recognize the serial cable and figuring out which port it is, which you'd still have to tackle with Java. However you will have added the additional requirement of making sure you've got a Java run time environment correctly installed that is an acceptable version for your application and the native serial port code.
Doing a port of the python code to java will certainly be a valuable educational experience for you, and might lead to something that might be usable on android some day, but I don't believe you are going to solve any of the problems you are hoping to.
Alternatively, if you really wanted to run on a JVM, you could look at what changes to the Python codebase (new GUI, serial interface, etc.) would be necessary to run under Jython/JPython instead of completely reimplementing everything. However, I don't know that in the end it would be that useful.
Just my opinion, others will hopefully correct me where I'm wrong.
--Rob